DanFosing/public-domain-poetry huggingface dataset:
Nursery Rhyme. CLIII. Songs.
by Unknown

Old Father of the Pye,
I cannot sing, my lips are dry;
But when my lips are very well wet,
Then I can sing with the Heigh go Bet!
The Old Men
by Walter De La Mare

Old and alone, sit we,
Caged, riddle-rid men;
Lost to Earth's "Listen!" and "See!"
Thought's "Wherefore?" and "When?"
Only far memories stray
Of a past once lovely, but now
Wasted and faded away,
Like green leaves from the bough.
Vast broods the silence of night,
The ruinous moon
Lifts on our faces her light,
Whence all dreaming is gone.
We speak not; trembles each head;
In their sockets our eyes are still;
Desire as cold as the dead;
Without wonder or will.
And One, with a lanthorn, draws near,
At clash with the moon in our eyes:
"Where art thou?" he asks: "I am here,"
One by one we arise.
And none lifts a hand to withhold
A friend from the touch of that foe:
Heart cries unto heart, "Thou art old!"
Yet, reluctant, we go.
Le Dernier Jour D'Un Condamn'.
by George Augustus Baker, Jr.

Old coat, for some three or four seasons
We've been jolly comrades, but now
We part, old companion, forever;
To fate, and the fashion, I bow.
You'd look well enough at a dinner,
I'd wear you with pride at a ball;
But I'm dressing to-night for a wedding 
My own and you'd not do at all.
You've too many wine-stains about you,
You're scented too much with cigars,
When the gas-light shines full on your collar,
It glitters with myriad stars,
That wouldn't look well at my wedding;
They'd seem inappropriate there 
Nell doesn't use diamond powder,
She tells me it ruins the hair.
You've been out on Cozzens' piazza
Too late, when the evenings were damp,
When the moon-beams were silvering Cro'nest,
And the lights were all out in the camp.
You've rested on highly-oiled stairways
Too often, when sweet eyes were bright,
And somebody's ball dress not Nellie's 
Flowed 'round you in rivers of white.
There's a reprobate looseness about you;
Should I wear you to-night, I believe,
As I come with my bride from the altar,
You'd laugh in your wicked old sleeve,
When you felt there the tremulous pressure
Of her hand, in its delicate glove,
That is telling me shyly, but proudly,
Her trust is as deep as her love.
So, go to your grave in the wardrobe,
And furnish a feast for the moth,
Nell's glove shall betray its sweet secrets
To younger, more innocent cloth.
'Tis time to put on your successor 
It's made in a fashion that's new;
Old coat, I'm afraid it will never
Sit as easily on me as you.
Poor Man's Grave. (From The Villager's Verse-Book.)
by William Lisle Bowles

Old Andrews of the hut is dead,
And many a child appears,
Whilst slowly "dust to dust" is read,
Around his grave in tears.
A good man gone where small and great,
And poor, and high and low,
And Dives, proud in worldly state,
And Lazarus, must go.
May we among the just be found,
Though short our sojourn here,
Who, when the trump of death shall sound,
May hear it without fear!
A Sea Song.
by Jean Ingelow

Old Albion sat on a crag of late.
And sang out - "Ahoy! ahoy!
Long, life to the captain, good luck to the mate.
And this to my sailor boy!
Come over, come home,
Through the salt sea foam,
My sailor, my sailor boy.
"Here's a crown to be given away, I ween,
A crown for my sailor's head,
And all for the worth of a widowed queen,
And the love of the noble dead;
And the fear and fame
Of the island's name
Where my boy was born and bred.
"Content thee, content thee, let it alone,
Thou marked for a choice so rare;
Though treaties be treaties, never a throne
Was proffered for cause as fair.
Yet come to me home,
Through the salt sea foam,
For the Greek must ask elsewhere.
"'Tis a pity, my sailor, but who can tell?
Many lands they look to me;
One of these might be wanting a Prince as well,
But that's as hereafter may be."
She raised her white head
And laughed; and she said
"That's as hereafter may be."
Letter VIII. From The Gander To The Turkey-Cock. (The Bird And Insects' Post-Office.)
by Robert Bloomfield

(CHARLES BLOOMFIELD.)
Old friend, you certainly have merit;
You really are a bird of spirit.
I'm quite surprised, I must confess;
I did not think you did possess
Such valour as you've lately shown - 
In fact, 'tis nearly like my own.
You know I've always been renown'd
For bravery, since first I found
That I could hiss; and feel I'm bolder
Each year that I am growing older.
You must, I'm sure, have often seen,
When in the pond, or on the green,
With all my family about me
(I can't think how they'd do without me),
Some human thing come striding by,
And how, without a scruple, I
March after him, and bite his heel;
And then, you know, the pride I feel
To hear, as back I march again,
The feat extoll'd by all my train.
But if I were to tell you all
The valiant actions, great and small,
That ever were achieved by me,
I never should have done, I see;
For cows, and pigs, and horses know
The consequence of such a foe.
However, I am glad to find
That you have such a noble mind,
And think, my friend, that by and by
You'll rise to be as great as I.
Your old friend,
HISS.
Nursery Rhyme. CCXXXVI. Riddles.
by Unknown

Old father Graybeard,
Without tooth or tongue;
If you'll give me your finger,
I'll give you my thumb.
The Retribution
by Clark Ashton Smith

Old Egypt's gods, Osiris, Ammon, Thoth,
Came on my dream in thunder, and their feet
Revealed, were as the levin's fire and heat.
The hosts of Rome, the Arab and the Goth
Have left their altars dark, yet stern and wroth
In olden power they stood, whose wings were fleet,
And mighty as with strength of storms that meet
In mingled foam of clouds and ocean-froth.
Above my dream, with arch of dreaded wings,
In judgement and in sentence of what crime
I knew not, sate the gods outcast of time.
They passed, and lo, a plague of darkness fell,
Unsleeping, and accurst with nameless things,
And dreams that stood the ministers of Hell!
Euclid
by Vachel Lindsay

(Moon Poems for the Children/Fairy-tales for the Children)
Old Euclid drew a circle
On a sand-beach long ago.
He bounded and enclosed it
With angles thus and so.
His set of solemn greybeards
Nodded and argued much
Of arc and of circumference,
Diameter and such.
A silent child stood by them
From morning until noon
Because they drew such charming
Round pictures of the moon.
To My Sister, On Her Twenty-First Birthday.
by George MacDonald

I.
Old fables are not all a lie
That tell of wondrous birth,
Of Titan children, father Sky,
And mighty mother Earth.
Yea, now are walking on the ground
Sons of the mingled brood;
Yea, now upon the earth are found
Such daughters of the Good.
Earth-born, my sister, thou art still
A daughter of the sky;
Oh, climb for ever up the hill
Of thy divinity!
To thee thy mother Earth is sweet,
Her face to thee is fair;
But thou, a goddess incomplete,
Must climb the starry stair.
II.
Wouldst thou the holy hill ascend,
Wouldst see the Father's face?
To all his other children bend,
And take the lowest place.
Be like a cottage on a moor,
A covert from the wind,
With burning fire and open door,
And welcome free and kind.
Thus humbly doing on the earth
The things the earthly scorn,
Thou shalt declare the lofty birth
Of all the lowly born.
III.
Be then thy sacred womanhood
A sign upon thee set,
A second baptism--understood--
For what thou must be yet.
For, cause and end of all thy strife,
And unrest as thou art,
Still stings thee to a higher life
The Father at thy heart.
King Cotton.
by George Pope Morris

Old Cotton is king, boys--aha!
With his locks so fleecy and white!
He shines among kings like a star!
And his is the sceptre of right,
Boys, of right,
And his is the sceptre of right!
Old Cotton, the king, has no care,
No queen, and no heir to his throne,
No courtiers, his triumphs to share,
He rules his dominions alone,
Boys, alone!
He rules his dominions alone!
Old Cotton, the merry old boy!--
Like smoke from the pipe in his mouth
His years glide away in their joy,
At home, in the warm sunny south,
Boys, the south,
At home, in the warm sunny south!
Old Cotton will pleasantly reign
When other kings painfully fall,
And ever and ever remain
The mightiest monarch of all,
Boys, of all,
The mightiest monarch of all!
Then here's to old Cotton, the king!
His true loyal subjects are we:
We'll laugh and we'll quaff and we'll sing,
A jolly old fellow is he,
Boys, is he,
A jolly old fellow is he!
On Pilgrimage
by Laurence Hope (Adela Florence Cory Nicolson)

Oh, youthful bearer of my palanquin,
Thy glossy hair lies loosened on thy neck,
The "tears of labour" gem thy velvet skin,
Whose even texture knows no other fleck.
Thy slender shoulder strains beneath my weight;
Too fair thou art for work, sweet slave of mine.
Would that this idle breast, reversing fate,
A willing serf to love, supported thine!
I smell the savage scent of sun-warmed fur
Close in the Jungle, musky, hot and sweet. - 
The air comes from thy shoulder, even as myrrh,
Would we were as the panthers, free to meet.
The Temple road is steep; I grieve to see
Thy slender ankles bruised among the clods.
Oh, my Beloved, if I might worship thee!
Beauty is greater far than all the Gods.
The Last Of April.
by John Clare

Old April wanes, and her last dewy morn
Her death-bed steeps in tears:--to hail the May
New blooming blossoms 'neath the sun are born,
And all poor April's charms are swept away.
The early primrose, peeping once so gay,
Is now chok'd up with many a mounting weed,
And the poor violet we once admir'd
Creeps in the grass unsought for--flowers succeed,
Gaudy and new, and more to be desired,
And of the old the school-boy seemeth tired.
So with us all, poor April, as with thee!
Each hath his day;--the future brings my fears:
Friends may grow weary, new flowers rising be,
And my last end, like thine, be steep'd in tears.
Old Homes
by Madison Julius Cawein

Old homes among the hills! I love their gardens;
Their old rock fences, that our day inherits;
Their doors, round which the great trees stand like wardens;
Their paths, down which the shadows march like spirits;
Broad doors and paths that reach bird-haunted gardens.
I see them gray among their ancient acres,
Severe of front, their gables lichen-sprinkled, - 
Like gentle-hearted, solitary Quakers,
Grave and religious, with kind faces wrinkled, - 
Serene among their memory-hallowed acres.
Their gardens, banked with roses and with lilies - 
Those sweet aristocrats of all the flowers - 
Where Springtime mints her gold in daffodillies,
And Autumn coins her marigolds in showers,
And all the hours are toilless as the lilies.
I love their orchards where the gay woodpecker
Flits, flashing o'er you, like a wing'd jewel;
Their woods, whose floors of moss the squirrels checker
With half-hulled nuts; and where, in cool renewal,
The wild brooks laugh, and raps the red woodpecker.
Old homes! old hearts! Upon my soul forever
Their peace and gladness lie like tears and laughter;
Like love they touch me, through the years that sever,
With simple faith; like friendship, draw me after
The dreamy patience that is theirs forever.
Old Homes
by Madison Julius Cawein

Old homes among the hills! I love their gardens,
Their old rock-fences, that our day inherits;
Their doors, 'round which the great trees stand like wardens;
Their paths, down which the shadows march like spirits;
Broad doors and paths that reach bird-haunted gardens.
I see them gray among their ancient acres,
Severe of front, their gables lichen-sprinkled,--
Like gentle-hearted, solitary Quakers,
Grave and religious, with kind faces wrinkled,--
Serene among their memory-hallowed acres.
Their gardens, banked with roses and with lilies--
Those sweet aristocrats of all the flowers--
Where Springtime mints her gold in daffodillies,
And Autumn coins her marigolds in showers,
And all the hours are toilless as the lilies.
I love their orchards where the gay woodpecker
Flits, flashing o'er you, like a winged jewel;
Their woods, whose floors of moss the squirrels checker
With half-hulled nuts; and where, in cool renewal,
The wild brooks laugh, and raps the red woodpecker.
Old homes! old hearts! Upon my soul forever
Their peace and gladness lie like tears and laughter;
Like love they touch me, through the years that sever,
With simple faith; like friendship, draw me after
The dreamy patience that is theirs forever.
Grandpere.
by Charles Sangster

Old Grandpere gat in the corner,
With his grandchild on his knee,
Looking up at his wrinkled visage,
For his winters were ninety-three.
Fair Eleanor's locks were flaxen,
The old man's once were gray,
But now, they were white as the snow-drift
That lay on the bleak highway.
Her summers rolled on as golden
As waves over sunny seas;
But Grandpere could perceive no summers,
The winters alone were his.
He folded his arms around her,
Like Winter embracing Spring;
And the angels looked down from heaven,
And smiled on their slumbering.
But soon the angelic faces
Were filled with seraphic light,
As they gazed on a beauteous spirit
Passing up through the frosty night:
Till it stood serene before them,
A youth most divinely fair;
And they saw that the new-born angel
Was the spirit of old Grandpere.
The Poet's Song
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Oh, you who read some song that I have sung,
What know you of the soul from whence it sprung?
Dost dream the poet ever speaks aloud
His secret thought unto the listening crowd?
Go take the murmuring sea-shell from the shore:
You have its shape, its color and no more.
It tells not one of those vast mysteries
That lie beneath the surface of the seas.
Our songs are shells, cast out by-waves of thought;
Here, take them at your pleasure; but think not
You've seen beneath the surface of the waves,
Where lie our shipwrecks and our coral caves.
To a Billy
by James Lister Cuthbertson

Old Billy, battered, brown and black
With many days of camping,
Companion of the bulging sack,
And friend in all our tramping:
How often on the Friday night,
Your cubic measure testing,
With jam and tea we stuffed you tight
Before we started nesting!
How often, in the moonlight pale,
Through gums and gullies toiling,
We've been the first the hill to scale,
The first to watch you boiling;
When at the lane the tent was spread
The silver wattle under,
And early shafts of rosy red
Cleft sea-born mists asunder!
And so, old Billy, you recall
A host of sun-burnt faces,
And bring us back again to all
The best of camping places.
True flavour of the bush you bear,
Of camp and its surrounding,
Of freedom and of open air,
Of healthy life abounding.
You bring us more, with those we love
We watched you boil and bubble,
And in the sunny skies above
Forgot each schoolboy trouble
So not without a kindly glance
We eye you in the study,
Although you've met with some mischance,
Although you're black and muddy!
Annisquam
by Madison Julius Cawein

Old days, old ways, old homes beside the sea;
Old gardens with old-fashioned flowers aflame,
Poppy, petunia, and many a name
Of many a flower of fragrant pedigree.
Old hills that glow with blue- and barberry,
And rocks and pines that stand on guard, the same,
Immutable, as when the Pilgrim came,
And here laid firm foundations of the Free.
The sunlight makes the dim dunes hills of snow,
And every vessel's sail a twinkling wing
Glancing the violet ocean far away:
The world is full of color and of glow;
A mighty canvas whereon God doth fling
The flawless picture of a perfect day.
Christmas.
by Thomas Frederick Young

Old father Time, his cruel scythe
Has swung full oft around,
Since last the merry Christmas, bells
Rang out their cheerful sound.
With cruel vigor he has held
His great, impartial sway,
And many thousands mown to earth,
Who saw last Christmas day.
For some have left this world for aye,
Who dwelt with us last year;
Glad voices heard amongst us then,
We never more shall hear.
But still we'll build our Christmas fires,
And sing our Christmas songs,
And for one day forget our griefs,
Our failures and our wrongs.
Then ring, ye joyful bells, ring out;
Ye crashing cymbals fall;
And for old Christmas, hale and stout,
Sound up, ye harps and all.
Let music's loud and sweetest strain
Beat from our hearts each ill;
Let thoughts of those assuage our pain,
Who are around us still.
Oh, winsome maid, oh, hearty youth,
I urge you on to glee,
For, in your innocence and truth,
You all are dear to me.
Nor youth, nor age should cherish gloom,
And voices oft should sing,
So give the gladsome voices room,
And let the joy-bells ring.
To Burns.
by W. M. MacKeracher

Suggested on returning home for my holidays by an old portrait of the poet, which hangs in my room.
Old friend! - I always loved thee;
In childhood's early days,
Delighted I would listen
With laughter to thy lays.
And better still I loved thee,
To riper boyhood grown;
Because thou wert the pride of
The land that's part my own.
But with devotion deepened
I greet thee now anew,
Of love, because thou singest
So simple, sweet, and true.
The Draft
by Hanford Lennox Gordon

Old Father Abe has issued his "Call"
For Three Hundred Thousand more!
By Jupiter, boys, he is after you all 
Lamed and maimed tall and small 
With his drag-net spread for a general haul
Of the "suckers" uncaught before.
I am sorry to see such a woeful change
In the health of the hardiest;
It is wonderful odd it is "passing strange" 
As over the country you travel and range,
To behold such a sudden, lamentable change
All over the East and the West.
"Blades" tough and hearty a week ago,
Who tippled and danced and laughed,
Are "suddenly taken," and some quite low
With an epidemical illness, you know:
"What! Zounds! the cholera?" you quiz; no no 
The doctors call it the "Draft."
What a blessed thing it were to be old 
A little past "forty-five;"
'Twere better indeed than a purse of gold
At a premium yet unwritten, untold,
For what poor devil that's now "enrolled"
Expects to get off alive?
There's a miracle wrought in the Democrats;
They swore it was murder and sin
To put in the "Niggers," like Kilkenny cats,
To clear the ship of the rebel rats,
But now I notice they swing their hats
And shout to the "Niggers" "Go in!"
Frankie's Trade
by Rudyard Kipling

Old Horn to All Atlantic said:
(A-hay O! To me O!)
"Now where did Frankie learn his trade?
For he ran me down with a three-reef mains'I."
(All round the Horn!)
Atlantic answered: "Not from me!
You'd better ask the cold North Sea,
For he ran me down under all plain canvas."
(All round the Horn!)
The North Sea answered: "He's my man,
For he came to me when he began,
Frankie Drake in an open coaster.
(All round the Sands!)
"I caught him young and I used him sore,
So you never shall startle Frankie more,
Without capsizing Earth and her waters.
(All round the Sands!)
"I did not favour him at all.
I made him pull and I made him haul,
And stand his trick with the common sailors.
(All round the Sands!)
"I froze him stiff and I fogged him blind,
And kicked him home with his road to find
By what he could see in a three-day snow-storm.
(All round the Sands!)
"I learned him his trade o' winter nights,
'Twixt Mardyk Fort and Dunkirk lights,
On a five-knot tide with the forts a-firing.
(All round the Sands!)
"Before his beard began to shoot,
I showed him the length of the Spaniard's foot,
And I reckon he clapped the boot on it later.
(All round the Sands!)
"If there's a risk which you can make,
That's worse than he was used to take
Nigh every week in the way of his business;
(All round the Sands!)
"If there's a trick that you can try,
Which he hasn't met in time gone by,
Not once or twice, but ten times over;
(All round the Sands!)
"If you can teach him aught that's new,
(A-hay O! To me O!)
I'll give you Bruges and Niewport too,
And the ten tall churches that stand between
Storm along, my gallant Captains!
(All round the Horn!)
Captain Orlando Killion
by Edgar Lee Masters

Oh, you young radicals and dreamers,
You dauntless fledglings
Who pass by my headstone,
Mock not its record of my captaincy in the army
And my faith in God!
They are not denials of each other.
Go by reverently, and read with sober care
How a great people, riding with defiant shouts
The centaur of Revolution,
Spurred and whipped to frenzy,
Shook with terror, seeing the mist of the sea
Over the precipice they were nearing,
And fell from his back in precipitate awe
To celebrate the Feast of the Supreme Being.
Moved by the same sense of vast reality
Of life and death, and burdened as they were
With the fate of a race,
How was I, a little blasphemer,
Caught in the drift of a nation's unloosened flood,
To remain a blasphemer,
And a captain in the army?
Nursery Rhyme. CCLXIV. Gaffers And Gammers.
by Unknown

Old Betty Blue
Lost a holiday shoe,
What can old Betty do?
Give her another
To match the other,
And then she may swagger in two.
Premiers Amours.
by Henry Austin Dobson

Old Loves and old dreams,--
"Requiescant in pace."
How strange now it seems,--
"Old" Loves and "old" dreams!
Yet we once wrote you reams
Maude, Alice, and Gracie!
Old Loves and old dreams,--
"Requiescant in pace."
When I called at the "Hollies" to-day,
In the room with the cedar-wood presses,
Aunt Deb. was just folding away
What she calls her "memorial dresses."
She'd the frock that she wore at fifteen,--
Short-waisted, of course--my abhorrence;
She'd "the loveliest"--something in "een"
That she wears in her portrait by Lawrence;
She'd the "jelick" she used--"as a Greek," (!)
She'd the habit she got her bad fall in;
She had e'en the blue moir' antique
That she opened Squire Grasshopper's ball in:--
New and old they were all of them there:--
Sleek velvet and bombazine stately,--
She had hung them each over a chair
To the "paniers" she's taken to lately
(Which she showed me, I think, by mistake).
And I conned o'er the forms and the fashions,
Till the faded old shapes seemed to wake
All the ghosts of my passed-away "passions;"--
From the days of love's youthfullest dream,
When the height of my shooting idea
Was to burn, like a young Polypheme,
For a somewhat mature Galatea.
There was Lucy, who "tiffed" with her first,
And who threw me as soon as her third came;
There was Norah, whose cut was the worst,
For she told me to wait till my "berd" came;
Pale Blanche, who subsisted on salts;
Blonde Bertha, who doted on Schiller;
Poor Amy, who taught me to waltz;
Plain Ann, that I wooed for the "siller;"--
All danced round my head in a ring,
Like "The Zephyrs" that somebody painted,
All shapes of the feminine thing--
Shy, scornful, seductive, and sainted,--
To my Wife, in the days she was young....
"How, Sir," says that lady, disgusted,
"Do you dare to include ME among
Your loves that have faded and rusted?"
"Not at all!"--I benignly retort.
(I was just the least bit in a temper!)
"Those, alas! were the fugitive sort,
But you are my--eadem semper!"
Full stop,--and a Sermon. Yet think,--
There was surely good ground for a quarrel,--
She had checked me when just on the brink
Of--I feel--a remarkable MORAL.
Five Criticisms - I
by Alfred Noyes

I.
(On many recent novels by the conventional unconventionalists.)
Old Pantaloon, lean-witted, dour and rich,
After grim years of soul-destroying greed,
Weds Columbine, that April-blooded witch
"Too young" to know that gold was not her need.
Then enters Pierrot, young, rebellious, warm,
With well-lined purse, to teach the fine-souled wife
That the old fool's gold should aid a world-reform
(Confused with sex). This wrecks the old fool's life.
O, there's no doubt that Pierrot was clever,
Quick to break hearts and quench the dying flame;
But why, for his own pride, does Pierrot never
Choose his own mate, work for his own high aim,
Stand on his feet, and pay for his own tune?
Why scold, cheat, rob and kill poor Pantaloon?
Ah! Yet Consider It Again!
by Arthur Hugh Clough

"Old things need not be therefore true,"
O brother men, nor yet the new;
Ah! still awhile the old thought retain,
And yet consider it again!
The souls of now two thousand years
Have laid up here their toils and tears,
And all the earnings of their pain,--
Ah, yet consider it again!
We! what do we see? each a space
Of some few yards before his face;
Does that the whole wide plan explain?
Ah, yet consider it again!
Alas! the great world goes its way,
And takes its truth from each new day;
They do not quit, nor can retain,
Far less consider it again.