DanFosing/public-domain-poetry huggingface dataset:
The Mother Of A Poet
by Sara Teasdale

She is too kind, I think, for mortal things,
Too gentle for the gusty ways of earth;
God gave to her a shy and silver mirth,
And made her soul as clear
And softly singing as an orchard spring's
In sheltered hollows all the sunny year,
A spring that thru the leaning grass looks up
And holds all heaven in its clarid cup,
Mirror to holy meadows high and blue
With stars like drops of dew.
I love to think that never tears at night
Have made her eyes less bright;
That all her girlhood thru
Never a cry of love made over-tense
Her voice's innocence;
That in her hands have lain,
Flowers beaten by the rain,
And little birds before they learned to sing
Drowned in the sudden ecstasy of spring.
I love to think that with a wistful wonder
She held her baby warm against her breast;
That never any fear awoke whereunder
She shuddered at her gift, or trembled lest
Thru the great doors of birth
Here to a windy earth
She lured from heaven a half-unwilling guest.
She caught and kept his first vague flickering smile,
The faint upleaping of his spirit's fire;
And for a long sweet while
In her was all he asked of earth or heaven,
But in the end how far,
Past every shaken star,
Should leap at last that arrow-like desire,
His full-grown manhood's keen
Ardor toward the unseen
Dark mystery beyond the Pleiads seven.
And in her heart she heard
His first dim-spoken word,
She only of them all could understand,
Flushing to feel at last
The silence over-past,
Thrilling as tho' her hand had touched God's hand.
But in the end how many words
Winged on a flight she could not follow,
Farther than skyward lark or swallow,
His lips should free to lands she never knew;
Braver than white sea-faring birds
With a fearless melody,
Flying over a shining sea,
A star-white song between the blue and blue.
Oh I have seen a lake as clear and fair
As it were molten air,
Lifting a lily upward to the sun.
How should the water know the glowing heart
That ever to the heaven lifts its fire,
A golden and unchangeable desire?
The water only knows
The faint and rosy glows
Of under-petals, opening apart.
Yet in the soul of earth,
Deep in the primal ground,
Its searching roots are wound,
And centuries have struggled toward its birth.
So, in the man who sings,
All of the voiceless horde
From the cold dawn of things
Have their reward;
All in whose pulses ran
Blood that is his at last,
From the first stooping man
Far in the winnowed past.
Out of the tumult of their love and mating
Each one created, seeing life was good,
Dumb, till at last the song that they were waiting
Breaks like brave April thru a wintry wood.
Sister Saint Luke.
by John Milton Hay

She lived shut in by flowers and trees
And shade of gentle bigotries.
On this side lay the trackless sea,
On that the great world's mystery;
But all unseen and all unguessed
They could not break upon her rest.
The world's far splendours gleamed and flashed,
Afar the wild seas foamed and dashed;
But in her small, dull Paradise,
Safe housed from rapture or surprise,
Nor day nor night had power to fright
The peace of God that filled her eyes.
Nature II
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

She is gamesome and good,
But of mutable mood,--
No dreary repeater now and again,
She will be all things to all men.
She who is old, but nowise feeble,
Pours her power into the people,
Merry and manifold without bar,
Makes and moulds them what they are,
And what they call their city way
Is not their way, but hers,
And what they say they made to-day,
They learned of the oaks and firs.
She spawneth men as mallows fresh,
Hero and maiden, flesh of her flesh;
She drugs her water and her wheat
With the flavors she finds meet,
And gives them what to drink and eat;
And having thus their bread and growth,
They do her bidding, nothing loath.
What's most theirs is not their own,
But borrowed in atoms from iron and stone,
And in their vaunted works of Art
The master-stroke is still her part.
Roscoe Purkapile
by Edgar Lee Masters

She loved me.
Oh! how she loved me I never had a chance to escape
From the day she first saw me.
But then after we were married I thought
She might prove her mortality and let me out,
Or she might divorce me. But few die, none resign.
Then I ran away and was gone a year on a lark.
But she never complained. She said all would be well
That I would return. And I did return.
I told her that while taking a row in a boat
I had been captured near Van Buren Street
By pirates on Lake Michigan,
And kept in chains, so I could not write her.
She cried and kissed me, and said it was cruel,
Outrageous, inhuman! I then concluded our marriage
Was a divine dispensation
And could not be dissolved,
Except by death.
I was right.
A Thought From Propertius
by William Butler Yeats

She might, so noble from head
To great shapely knees,
The long flowing line,
Have walked to the altar
Through the holy images
At Pallas Athene's side,
Or been fit spoil for a centaur
Drunk with the unmixed wine.
A Minute
by Ellis Parker Butler

She plucked a blossom fair to see;
Upon my coat I let her pin it;
And thus we stood beneath the tree
A minute.
She turned her smiling face to me;
I saw a roguish sweetness in it;
I kissed her once; it took, maybe,
A minute.
The time was paltry, you'll agree;
It took but little to begin it;
But since my heart has not been free
A minute.
She Is Coming, My Own, My Sweet
by Alfred Lord Tennyson

She is coming, my own, my sweet;
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed,
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead,
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.
The Playmate
by Rudyard Kipling

She is not Folly, that I know.
Her steadfast eyelids tell me so
When, at the hour the lights divide,
She steals as summonsed to my side.
When, finger on the pursed lip
In secret, mirthful fellowship,
She, heralding new framed delights,
Breathes, "This shall be a Night of Nights!"
Then, out of Time and out of Space,
Is built an Hour and a Place
Where all an earnest, baffled Earth
Blunders and trips to make us mirth;
Whence from the trivial flux of Things,
Rise inconceived miscarryings,
Outrageous but immortal, shown,
Of Her great love, to me alone....
She is not Wisdom, but, maybe,
Wiser than all the Norns is She:
And more than Wisdom I prefer 
To wait on Her, to wait on Her!
She Is Far From The Land.
by Thomas Moore

She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps,
And lovers are round her, sighing:
But coldly she turns from their gaze, and weeps,
For her heart in his grave is lying.
She sings the wild song of her dear native plains,
Every note which he loved awaking;--
Ah! little they think who delight in her strains,
How the heart of the Minstrel is breaking.
He had lived for his love, for his country he died,
They were all that to life had entwined him;
Nor soon shall the tears of his country be dried,
Nor long will his love stay behind him.
Oh! make her a grave where the sunbeams rest,
When they promise a glorious morrow;
They'll shine o'er her sleep, like a smile from the West,
From her own loved island of sorrow.
The Parting
by Madison Julius Cawein

She passed the thorn-trees, whose gaunt branches tossed
Their spider-shadows round her; and the breeze,
Beneath the ashen moon, was full of frost,
And mouthed and mumbled to the sickly trees,
Like some starved hag who sees her children freeze.
Dry-eyed she waited by the sycamore.
Some stars made misty blotches in the sky.
And all the wretched willows on the shore
Looked faded as a jaundiced cheek or eye.
She felt their pity and could only sigh.
And then his skiff ground on the river rocks.
Whistling he came into the shadow made
By that dead tree. He kissed her dark brown locks;
And round her form his eager arms were laid.
Passive she stood, her secret unbetrayed.
And then she spoke, while still his greeting kiss
Ached in her hair. She did not dare to lift
Her eyes to his her anguished eyes to his,
While tears smote crystal in her throat. One rift
Of weakness humored might set all adrift.
Anger and shame were his. She meekly heard.
And then the oar-locks sounded, and her brain
Remembered he had said no farewell word;
And wild emotion swept her; and again
Left her as silent as a carven pain.
She, in the old sad farmhouse, wearily
Resumed the drudgery of her common lot,
Regret remembering. 'Midst old vices, he,
Who would have trod on, and somehow did not,
The wildflower, that had brushed his feet, forgot.
That The Night Come
by William Butler Yeats

She lived in storm and strife,
Her soul had such desire
For what proud death may bring
That it could not endure
The common good of life,
But lived as 'twere a king
That packed his marriage day
With banneret and pennon,
Trumpet and kettledrum,
And the outrageous cannon,
To bundle time away
That the night come.
At The Word "Farewell"
by Thomas Hardy

She looked like a bird from a cloud
On the clammy lawn,
Moving alone, bare-browed
In the dim of dawn.
The candles alight in the room
For my parting meal
Made all things withoutdoors loom
Strange, ghostly, unreal.
The hour itself was a ghost,
And it seemed to me then
As of chances the chance furthermost
I should see her again.
I beheld not where all was so fleet
That a Plan of the past
Which had ruled us from birthtime to meet
Was in working at last:
No prelude did I there perceive
To a drama at all,
Or foreshadow what fortune might weave
From beginnings so small;
But I rose as if quicked by a spur
I was bound to obey,
And stepped through the casement to her
Still alone in the gray.
"I am leaving you . . . Farewell!" I said,
As I followed her on
By an alley bare boughs overspread;
"I soon must be gone!"
Even then the scale might have been turned
Against love by a feather,
- But crimson one cheek of hers burned
When we came in together.
Sappho
by Charles Kingsley

She lay among the myrtles on the cliff;
Above her glared the noon; beneath, the sea.
Upon the white horizon Atho's peak
Weltered in burning haze; all airs were dead;
The cicale slept among the tamarisk's hair;
The birds sat dumb and drooping.    Far below
The lazy sea-weed glistened in the sun;
The lazy sea-fowl dried their steaming wings;
The lazy swell crept whispering up the ledge,
And sank again.    Great Pan was laid to rest;
And Mother Earth watched by him as he slept,
And hushed her myriad children for a while.
She lay among the myrtles on the cliff;
And sighed for sleep, for sleep that would not hear,
But left her tossing still; for night and day
A mighty hunger yearned within her heart,
Till all her veins ran fever; and her cheek,
Her long thin hands, and ivory-channelled feet,
Were wasted with the wasting of her soul.
Then peevishly she flung her on her face,
And hid her eyeballs from the blinding glare,
And fingered at the grass, and tried to cool
Her crisp hot lips against the crisp hot sward:
And then she raised her head, and upward cast
Wild looks from homeless eyes, whose liquid light
Gleamed out between deep folds of blue-black hair,
As gleam twin lakes between the purple peaks
Of deep Parnassus, at the mournful moon.
Beside her lay her lyre.    She snatched the shell,
And waked wild music from its silver strings;
Then tossed it sadly by. - 'Ah, hush!' she cries;
'Dead offspring of the tortoise and the mine!
Why mock my discords with thine harmonies?
Although a thrice-Olympian lot be thine,
Only to echo back in every tone
The moods of nobler natures than thine own.'
Eversley, 1847
From Yeast.
Dora
by Thomas Edward Brown

She knelt upon her brother's grave,
My little girl of six years old,
He used to be so good and brave,
The sweetest lamb of all our fold;
He used to shout, he used to sing,
Of all our tribe the little king,
And so unto the turf her ear she laid,
To hark if still in that dark place he play'd.
No sound! no sound!
Death's silence was profound;
And horror crept
Into her aching heart, and Dora wept.
If this is as it ought to be,
My God, I leave it unto Thee.
The Half-Breed Girl
by Duncan Campbell Scott

She is free of the trap and the paddle,
The portage and the trail,
But something behind her savage life
Shines like a fragile veil.
Her dreams are undiscovered,
Shadows trouble her breast,
When the time for resting cometh
Then least is she at rest.
Oft in the morns of winter,
When she visits the rabbit snares,
An appearance floats in the crystal air
Beyond the balsam firs.
Oft in the summer mornings
When she strips the nets of fish,
The smell of the dripping net-twine
Gives to her heart a wish.
But she cannot learn the meaning
Of the shadows in her soul,
The lights that break and gather,
The clouds that part and roll,
The reek of rock-built cities,
Where her fathers dwelt of yore,
The gleam of loch and shealing,
The mist on the moor,
Frail traces of kindred kindness,
Of feud by hill and strand,
The heritage of an age-long life
In a legendary land.
She wakes in the stifling wigwam,
Where the air is heavy and wild,
She fears for something or nothing
With the heart of a frightened child.
She sees the stars turn slowly
Past the tangle of the poles,
Through the smoke of the dying embers,
Like the eyes of dead souls.
Her heart is shaken with longing
For the strange, still years,
For what she knows and knows not,
For the wells of ancient tears.
A voice calls from the rapids,
Deep, careless and free,
A voice that is larger than her life
Or than her death shall be.
She covers her face with her blanket,
Her fierce soul hates her breath,
As it cries with a sudden passion
For life or death.
Song
by George MacDonald

She loves thee, loves thee not!
That, that is all, my heart.
Why should she take a part
In every selfish blot,
In every greedy spot
That now doth ache and smart
Because she loves thee not--
Not, not at all, poor heart!
Thou art no such dove-cot
Of virtues--no such chart
Of highways, though the dart
Of love be through thee shot!
Why should she not love not
Thee, poor, pinched, selfish heart?
Psyche
by Robert Laurence Binyon

She is not fair, as some are fair,
Cold as the snow, as sunshine gay:
On her clear brow, come grief what may,
She suffers not too stern an air;
But, grave in silence, sweet in speech,
Loves neither mockery nor disdain;
Gentle to all, to all doth teach
The charm of deeming nothing vain.
She join'd me: and we wander'd on;
And I rejoiced, I cared not why,
Deeming it immortality
To walk with such a soul alone.
Primroses pale grew all around,
Violets, and moss, and ivy wild;
Yet, drinking sweetness from the ground,
I was but conscious that she smiled.
The wind blew all her shining hair
From her sweet brows; and she, the while,
Put back her lovely head, to smile
On my enchanted spirit there.
Jonquils and pansies round her head
Gleam'd softly; but a heavenlier hue
Upon her perfect cheek was shed,
And in her eyes a purer blue.
There came an end to break the spell;
She murmur'd something in my ear;
The words fell vague, I did not hear,
And ere I knew, I said farewell;
And homeward went, with happy heart
And spirit dwelling in a gleam,
Rapt to a Paradise apart,
With all the world become a dream.
Yet now, too soon, the world's strong strife
Breaks on me pitiless again;
The pride of passion, hopes made vain,
The wounds, the weariness, of life.
And losing that forgetful sphere,
For some less troubled world I sigh,
If not divine, more free, more clear,
Than this poor, soil'd humanity.
But when, in trances of the night,
Wakeful, my lonely bed I keep,
And linger at the gate of Sleep,
Fearing, lest dreams deny me light;
Her image comes into the gloom,
With her pale features moulded fair,
Her breathing beauty, morning bloom,
My heart's delight, my tongue's despair.
With loving hand she touches mine,
Showers her soft tresses on my brow,
And heals my heart, I know not how,
Bathing me with her looks divine.
She beckons me; and I arise;
And, grief no more remembering,
Wander again with rapturous eyes
Through those enchanted lands of Spring.
Then, as I walk with her in peace,
I leave this troubled air below,
Where, hurrying sadly to and fro,
Men toil, and strain, and cannot cease:
Then, freed from tyrannous Fate's control,
Untouch'd by years or grief, I see
Transfigured in that child-like soul
The soil'd soul of humanity.
Our Bird.
by Marietta Holley

She lay asleep, and her face shone white
As under a snowy veil,
And the waxen hands clasped on her breast
Were full of snowdrops pale;
But a holy calm touched the baby lips,
The brow, and the sleeping eyes,
The look of an angel pitying us
From the peace of Paradise.
And now though she lies 'neath the coffin-lid,
We cannot think her dead;
But we think of her as of some delicate bird
To a milder country fled.
'Twas a long, dark flight for our gentle dove,
Our bird so tender and fair;
But we know she has reached the summer land
And folded her white wings there.
Spirit Of Sadness
by Richard Le Gallienne

She loved the Autumn, I the Spring,
Sad all the songs she loved to sing;
And in her face was strangely set
Some great inherited regret.
Some look in all things made her sigh,
Yea! sad to her the morning sky:
'So sad! so sad its beauty seems' - 
I hear her say it still in dreams.
But when the day grew grey and old,
And rising stars shone strange and cold,
Then only in her face I saw
A mystic glee, a joyous awe.
Spirit of Sadness, in the spheres
Is there an end of mortal tears?
Or is there still in those great eyes
That look of lonely hills and skies?
Vashti.
by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

She leaned her head upon her hand
And heard the King's decree -
"My lords are feasting in my halls;
Bid Vashti come to me.
"I've shown the treasures of my house,
My costly jewels rare,
But with the glory of her eyes
No rubies can compare.
"Adorn'd and crown'd I'd have her come,
With all her queenly grace,
And, 'mid my lords and mighty men,
Unveil her lovely face.
"Each gem that sparkles in my crown,
Or glitters on my throne,
Grows poor and pale when she appears,
My beautiful, my own!"
All waiting stood the chamberlains
To hear the Queen's reply.
They saw her cheek grow deathly pale,
But light flash'd to her eye:
"Go, tell the King," she proudly said,
"That I am Persia's Queen,
And by his crowds of merry men
I never will be seen.
"I'll take the crown from off my head
And tread it 'neath my feet,
Before their rude and careless gaze
My shrinking eyes shall meet.
"A queen unveil'd before the crowd! -
Upon each lip my name! -
Why, Persia's women all would blush
And weep for Vashti's shame!
"Go back!" she cried, and waved her hand,
And grief was in her eye:
"Go, tell the King," she sadly said,
"That I would rather die."
They brought her message to the King;
Dark flash'd his angry eye;
'Twas as the lightning ere the storm
Hath swept in fury by.
Then bitterly outspoke the King,
Through purple lips of wrath -
"What shall be done to her who dares
To cross your monarch's path?"
Then spake his wily counsellors -
"O King of this fair land!
From distant Ind to Ethiop,
All bow to thy command.
"But if, before thy servants' eyes,
This thing they plainly see,
That Vashti doth not heed thy will
Nor yield herself to thee,
"The women, restive 'neath our rule,
Would learn to scorn our name,
And from her deed to us would come
Reproach and burning shame.
"Then, gracious King, sign with thy hand
This stern but just decree,
That Vashti lay aside her crown,
Thy Queen no more to be."
She heard again the King's command,
And left her high estate;
Strong in her earnest womanhood,
She calmly met her fate,
And left the palace of the King,
Proud of her spotless name -
A woman who could bend to grief,
But would not bow to shame.
Her Mission.
by Jean Blewett

She is so winsome and so wise
She sways me at her will,
And oft the question will arise,
What mission does she fill?
O then I say with pride untold,
And love beyond degree,
This woman with the heart of gold,
She just keeps house for me - 
For me,
She just keeps house for me!
A full content dwells on her face,
She's quite in love with life,
And for a title wears with grace
The sweet old-fashioned "wife."
Our children climb upon her knee,
And nestle on her breast,
And ah! her mission seems to me
The grandest and the best.
O then I say with pride untold,
And love beyond degree,
This woman with the heart of gold,
She just keeps house for me - 
For me,
She just keeps house for me!
Husks
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

She looked at her neighbour's house in the light of the waning day - 
A shower of rice on the steps, and the shreds of a bride's bouquet.
And then she drew the shade, to shut out the growing gloom,
But she shut it into her heart instead.    (Was that a voice in the room?)
'My neighbour is sad,' she sighed, 'like the mother bird who sees
The last of her brood fly out of the nest to make its home in the trees' - 
And then in a passion of tears - 'But, oh, to be sad like her:
Sad for a joy that has come and gone!'    (Did some one speak, or stir?)
She looked at her faded hands, all burdened with costly rings;
She looked on her widowed home, all burdened with priceless things.
She thought of the dead years gone, of the empty years ahead - 
(Yes, something stirred and something spake, and this was what it said:)
'The voice of the Might Have Been speaks here through the lonely dusk;
Life offered the fruits of love; you gathered only the husk.
There are jewels ablaze on your breast where never a child has slept.'
She covered her face with her ringed old hands, and wept and wept and wept.
The Blind and the Dead
by Robert William Service

She lay like a saint on her copper couch;
Like an angel asleep she lay,
In the stare of the ghoulish folks that slouch
Past the Dead and sneak away.
Then came old Jules of the sightless gaze,
Who begged in the streets for bread.
Each day he had come for a year of days,
And groped his way to the Dead.
"What's the Devil's Harvest to-day?" he cried;
"A wanton with eyes of blue!
I've known too many a such," he sighed;
"Maybe I know this . . . mon Dieu!"
He raised the head of the heedless Dead;
He fingered the frozen face. . . .
Then a deathly spell on the watchers fell -
God! it was still, that place!
He raised the head of the careless Dead;
He fumbled a vagrant curl;
And then with his sightless smile he said:
"It's only my little girl."
"Dear, my dear, did they hurt you so!
Come to your daddy's heart. . . ."
Aye, and he held so tight, you know,
They were hard to force apart.
No! Paris isn't always gay;
And the morgue has its stories too:
You are a writer of tales, you say -
Then there is a tale for you.
Hoodoo.
by Madison Julius Cawein

She mutters and stoops by the lone bayou
The little green leaves are hushed on the trees
An owl in an oak cries"Who-oh-who,"
And a fox barks back where the moon slants through
The moss that sways to a sudden breeze'
Or That she sees,
Whose eyes are coals in the light o' the moon.
"Soon, oh, soon," hear her croon,
" Woe, oh, woe to the octoroon!"
She mutters and kneels and her bosom is bare
The little green leaves are stirred on the trees
A black bat brushes her unkempt hair,
And the hiss of a snake glides 'round her there'
Or is it the voice of the ghostly breeze,
Or That she sees,
Whose mouth is flame in the light o' the moon?
"Soon, oh, soon," hear her croon,
"Woe, oh, woe to the octoroon!"
She mutters and digs and buries it deep
The little green leaves are wild on the trees
And nearer and nearer the noises creep,
That gibber and maunder and whine and weep'
Or is it the wave and the weariless breeze,
Or That she sees,
Which hobbles away in the light o' the moon?
"Soon, oh, soon," hear her croon,
"Woe, oh, woe to the octoroon!"
In the hut where the other girl sits with him
The little green leaves hang limp on the trees
All on a sudden the moon grows dim'
Is it the shadow of cloud or of limb,
Cast in the door by the moaning breeze?
Or That she sees,
Which limps and leers in the light o' the moon?
"Soon, oh, soon," hear it croon,
"Woe, oh, woe to the octoroon!"
It has entered in at the open door
The little green leaves fall dead from the trees
And she in the cabin lies stark on the floor,
And she in the woods has her lover once more'
And is it the hoot of the dying breeze?
Or him who sees,
Who mocks and laughs in the light o' the moon:
"Soon, oh, soon," hear him croon,
"Woe, oh, woe to the octoroon!"