DanFosing/public-domain-poetry huggingface dataset:
The Englishman
by Walter De La Mare

I met a sailor in the woods,
A silver ring wore he,
His hair hung black, his eyes shone blue,
And thus he said to me: - 
'What country, say, of this round earth,
What shore of what salt sea,
Be this, my son, I wander in,
And looks so strange to me?'
Says I, 'O foreign sailorman,
In England now you be,
This is her wood, and this her sky,
And that her roaring sea.'
He lifts his voice yet louder,
'What smell be this,' says he,
'My nose on the sharp morning air
Snuffs up so greedily?'
Says I, 'It is wild roses
Do smell so winsomely,
And winy briar too,' says I,
'That in these thickets be.'
'And oh!' says he, 'what leetle bird
Is singing in yon high tree,
So every shrill and long-drawn note
Like bubbles breaks in me?'
Says I, 'It is the mavis
That perches in the tree,
And sings so shrill, and sings so sweet,
When dawn comes up the sea.'
At which he fell a-musing,
And fixed his eye on me,
As one alone 'twixt light and dark
A spirit thinks to see
'England!' he whispers soft and harsh,
'England!' repeated he,
'And briar, and rose, and mavis,
A-singing in yon high tree.
'Ye speak me true, my leetle son,
So - so, it came to me,
A-drifting landwards on a spar,
And grey dawn on the sea.
'Ay, ay, I could not be mistook;
I knew them leafy trees,
I knew that land so witcherie sweet,
And that old noise of seas.
'Though here I've sailed a score of years,
And heard 'em, dream or wake,
Lap small and hollow 'gainst my cheek,
On sand and coral break;
'"Yet now, my leetle son," says I,
A-drifting on the wave,
"That land I see so safe and green
Is England, I believe.
'"And that there wood is English wood,
And this here cruel sea,
The selfsame old blue ocean
Years gone remembers me,
"A-sitting with my bread and butter
Down ahind yon chitterin' mill;
And this same Marinere" - (that's me),
"Is that same leetle Will! - 
"That very same wee leetle Will
Eating his bread and butter there,
A-looking on the broad blue sea
Betwixt his yaller hair!"
'And here be I, my son, throwed up
Like corpses from the sea,
Ships, stars, winds, tempests, pirates past,
Yet leetle Will I be!'
He said no more, that sailorman,
But in a reverie
Stared like the figure of a ship
With painted eyes to sea.
I Love You As I Love The Night's High Vault
by Charles Baudelaire

I love you as I love the night's high vault
O silent one, 0 sorrow's lachrymal,
And love you more because you flee from me,
And temptress of my nights, ironically
You seem to hoard the space, to take to you
What separates my arms from heaven's blue.
I climb to the assault, attack the source,
A choir of wormlets pressing towards a corpse,
And cherish your unbending cruelty,
This iciness so beautiful to me.
A Coat
by William Butler Yeats

I Made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.
Venus' Looking-Glass.
by Christina Georgina Rossetti

I marked where lovely Venus and her court
With song and dance and merry laugh went by;
Weightless, their wingless feet seemed made to fly,
Bound from the ground and in mid air to sport.
Left far behind I heard the dolphins snort,
Tracking their goddess with a wistful eye,
Around whose head white doves rose, wheeling high
Or low, and cooed after their tender sort.
All this I saw in spring. Through summer heat
I saw the lovely Queen of Love no more.
But when flushed autumn through the woodlands went
I spied sweet Venus walk amid the wheat:
Whom seeing, every harvester gave o'er
His toil, and laughed and hoped and was content.
I Met A Man
by Thomas Hardy

I met a man when night was nigh,
Who said, with shining face and eye
Like Moses' after Sinai:-
"I have seen the Moulder of Monarchies,
Realms, peoples, plains and hills,
Sitting upon the sunlit seas! -
And, as He sat, soliloquies
Fell from Him like an antiphonic breeze
That pricks the waves to thrills.
"Meseemed that of the maimed and dead
Mown down upon the globe, -
Their plenteous blooms of promise shed
Ere fruiting-time - His words were said,
Sitting against the western web of red
Wrapt in His crimson robe.
"And I could catch them now and then:
- 'Why let these gambling clans
Of human Cockers, pit liege men
From mart and city, dale and glen,
In death-mains, but to swell and swell again
Their swollen All-Empery plans,
"'When a mere nod (if my malign
Compeer but passive keep)
Would mend that old mistake of mine
I made with Saul, and ever consign
All Lords of War whose sanctuaries enshrine
Liberticide, to sleep?
"'With violence the lands are spread
Even as in Israel's day,
And it repenteth me I bred
Chartered armipotents lust-led
To feuds . . . Yea, grieves my heart, as then I said,
To see their evil way!'
- "The utterance grew, and flapped like flame,
And further speech I feared;
But no Celestial tongued acclaim,
And no huzzas from earthlings came,
And the heavens mutely masked as 'twere in shame
Till daylight disappeared."
Thus ended he as night rode high -
The man of shining face and eye,
Like Moses' after Sinai.
1916.
The Short Fear
by Ben Jonson

My awkward grossness grows: I go down, through
I maintain my self in the conviction
that I have as much to say as others
and more apposite ways of saying it
Certainly I feel it has all been said
The short fear is that even saying it
in my own way is equally pointless
Sorrow's Treachery
by Robert Fuller Murray

I made a truce last night with Sorrow,
The queen of tears, the foe of sleep,
To keep her tents until the morrow,
Nor send such dreams to make me weep.
Before the lusty day was springing,
Before the tired moon was set,
I dreamed I heard my dead love singing,
And when I woke my eyes were wet.
I Will Be Worthy Of It.
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

I may not reach the heights I seek,
My untried strength may fail me,
Or, half-way up the mountain peak,
Fierce tempests may assail me.
But though that place I never gain,
Herein lies comfort for my pain - 
I will be worthy of it.
I may not triumph in success,
Despite my earnest labor;
I may not grasp results that bless
The efforts of my neighbor;
But though my goal I never see,
This thought shall always dwell with me - 
I will be worthy of it.
The golden glory of Love's light
May never fall on my way;
My path may always lead through night,
Like some deserted by-way;
But though life's dearest joy I miss
There lies a nameless strength in this - 
I will be worthy of it.
I Met At Eve
by Walter De La Mare

I met at eve the Prince of Sleep,
His was a still and lovely face,
He wandered through a valley steep
Lovely in a lonely place.
His garb was grey of lavender,
About his brows a poppy-wreath
Burned like dim coals, and everywhere
The air was sweeter for his breath.
His twilight feet no sandals wore,
His eyes shone faint in their own flame,
Fair moths that gloomed his steps before
Seemed letters of his lovely name.
His house is in the mountain ways,
A phantom house of misty walls,
Whose golden flocks at evening graze,
And witch the moon with muffled calls.
Upwelling from his shadowy springs
Sweet waters shake a trembling sound,
There flit the hoot-owl's silent wings,
There hath his web the silkworm wound.
Dark in his pools clear visions lurk,
And rosy, as with morning buds,
Along his dales of broom and birk
Dreams haunt his solitary woods.
I met at eve the Prince of Sleep,
His was a still and lovely face,
He wandered through a valley steep,
Lovely in a lonely place.
Coole Park
by William Butler Yeats

I meditate upon a swallow's flight,
Upon a aged woman and her house,
A sycamore and lime-tree lost in night
Although that western cloud is luminous,
Great works constructed there in nature's spite
For scholars and for poets after us,
Thoughts long knitted into a single thought,
A dance-like glory that those walls begot.
There Hyde before he had beaten into prose
That noble blade the Muses buckled on,
There one that ruffled in a manly pose
For all his timid heart, there that slow man,
That meditative man, John Synge, and those
Impetuous men, Shawe-Taylor and Hugh Lane,
Found pride established in humility,
A scene well Set and excellent company.
They came like swallows and like swallows went,
And yet a woman's powerful character
Could keep a Swallow to its first intent;
And half a dozen in formation there,
That seemed to whirl upon a compass-point,
Found certainty upon the dreaming air,
The intellectual sweetness of those lines
That cut through time or cross it withershins.
Here, traveler, scholar, poet, take your stand
When all those rooms and passages are gone,
When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound
And saplings root among the broken stone,
And dedicate - eyes bent upon the ground,
Back turned upon the brightness of the sun
And all the sensuality of the shade,
A moment's memory to that laureled head.
North Wind
by Lola Ridge

I love you, malcontent
Male wind - 
Shaking the pollen from a flower
Or hurling the sea backward from the grinning sand.
Blow on and over my dreams...
Scatter my sick dreams...
Throw your lusty arms about me...
Envelop all my hot body...
Carry me to pine forests - 
Great, rough-bearded forests...
Bring me to stark plains and steppes...
I would have the North to-night - 
The cold, enduring North.
And if we should meet the Snow,
Whirling in spirals,
And he should blind my eyes...
Ally, you will defend me - 
You will hold me close,
Blowing on my eyelids.
Ozymandias.
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Song For 'Tasso'.
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

1.
I loved - alas! our life is love;
But when we cease to breathe and move
I do suppose love ceases too.
I thought, but not as now I do,
Keen thoughts and bright of linked lore,
Of all that men had thought before.
And all that Nature shows, and more.
2.
And still I love and still I think,
But strangely, for my heart can drink
The dregs of such despair, and live,
And love;...
And if I think, my thoughts come fast,
I mix the present with the past,
And each seems uglier than the last.
3.
Sometimes I see before me flee
A silver spirit's form, like thee,
O Leonora, and I sit
...still watching it,
Till by the grated casement's ledge
It fades, with such a sigh, as sedge
Breathes o'er the breezy streamlet's edge.
Young Love II - "I make this rhyme of my lady and me"
by Richard Le Gallienne

I make this rhyme of my lady and me
To give me ease of my misery,
Of my lady and me I make this rhyme
For lovers in the after-time.
And I weave its warp from day to day
In a golden loom deep hid away
In my secret heart, where no one goes
But my lady's self, and - no one knows.
With bended head all day I pore
On a joyless task, and yet before
My eyes all day, through each weary hour,
Breathes my lady's face like a dewy flower.
Like rain it comes through the dusty air,
Like sun on the meadows to think of her;
O sweet as violets in early spring
The flower-girls to the city bring,
O, healing-bright to wintry eyes
As primrose-gold 'neath northern skies -
But O for fit thing to compare
With the joy I have in the thought of her!
So all day long doth her holy face
Bring fragrance to the barren place,
And whensoe'er it comes nearest me,
My loom it weaveth busily.
Some days there be when the loom is still
And my soul is sad as an autumn hill,
But how to tell the blessed time
When my heart is one glowing prayer of rhyme!
Think on the humming afternoon
Within some busy wood in June,
When nettle patches, drunk with the sun,
Are fiery outposts of the shade;
While gnats keep up a dizzy reel,
And the grasshopper, perched upon his blade,
Loud drones his fairy threshing-wheel: -
Hour when some poet-wit might feign
The drowsy tune of the throbbing air
The weaving of the gossamer
In secret nooks of wood and lane -
The gossamer, silk night-robes of the flowers,
Fluttered apart by amorous morning hours.
Yea, as the weaving of the gossamer,
If truly that the mystic golden boom,
Is the strange rapture of my hidden loom,
As I sit in the light of the thought of her;
And it weaveth, weaveth, day by day,
This parti-coloured roundelay;
Weaving for ease of misery,
Weaving this rhyme of my lady and me,
Weaving, weaving this warp of rhyme
For lovers in the after-time.
My lady, lover, may never be mine
In the same sweet way that thine is thine,
My lady and I may never stand
By the holy altar hand in hand,
My lady and I may never rest
Through the golden midnight breast to breast,
Nor share long days of happy light
Sweet moving in each other's sight:
Yea, even must we ever miss
The honey of the chastest kiss.
On A Curate's Complaint Of Hard Duty
by Jonathan Swift

I marched three miles through scorching sand,
With zeal in heart, and notes in hand;
I rode four more to Great St. Mary,
Using four legs, when two were weary:
To three fair virgins I did tie men,
In the close bands of pleasing Hymen;
I dipp'd two babes in holy water,
And purified their mother after.
Within an hour and eke a half,
I preach'd three congregations deaf;
Where, thundering out, with lungs long-winded,
I chopp'd so fast, that few there minded.
My emblem, the laborious sun,
Saw all these mighty labours done
Before one race of his was run.
All this perform'd by Robert Hewit:
What mortal else could e'er go through it!
A Sign-Seeker
by Thomas Hardy

I mark the months in liveries dank and dry,
The noontides many-shaped and hued;
I see the nightfall shades subtrude,
And hear the monotonous hours clang negligently by.
I view the evening bonfires of the sun
On hills where morning rains have hissed;
The eyeless countenance of the mist
Pallidly rising when the summer droughts are done.
I have seen the lightning-blade, the leaping star,
The cauldrons of the sea in storm,
Have felt the earthquake's lifting arm,
And trodden where abysmal fires and snow-cones are.
I learn to prophesy the hid eclipse,
The coming of eccentric orbs;
To mete the dust the sky absorbs,
To weigh the sun, and fix the hour each planet dips.
I witness fellow earth-men surge and strive;
Assemblies meet, and throb, and part;
Death's soothing finger, sorrow's smart;
- All the vast various moils that mean a world alive.
But that I fain would wot of shuns my sense -
Those sights of which old prophets tell,
Those signs the general word so well,
Vouchsafed to their unheed, denied my long suspense.
In graveyard green, behind his monument
To glimpse a phantom parent, friend,
Wearing his smile, and "Not the end!"
Outbreathing softly: that were blest enlightenment;
Or, if a dead Love's lips, whom dreams reveal
When midnight imps of King Decay
Delve sly to solve me back to clay,
Should leave some print to prove her spirit-kisses real;
Or, when Earth's Frail lie bleeding of her Strong,
If some Recorder, as in Writ,
Near to the weary scene should flit
And drop one plume as pledge that Heaven inscrolls the wrong.
- There are who, rapt to heights of tranced trust,
These tokens claim to feel and see,
Read radiant hints of times to be -
Of heart to heart returning after dust to dust.
Such scope is granted not to lives like mine . . .
I have lain in dead men's beds, have walked
The tombs of those with whom I'd talked,
Called many a gone and goodly one to shape a sign,
And panted for response. But none replies;
No warnings loom, nor whisperings
To open out my limitings,
And Nescience mutely muses: When a man falls he lies.
The Answer
by Edgar Lee Masters

I made my bed beneath the pines
Where the sea washed the sandy bars;
I heard the music of the winds,
And blest the aureate face of Mars.
All night a lilac splendor throve
Above the heaven's shadowy verge;
And in my heart the voice of love
Kept music with the dreaming surge.
A little maid was at my side, 
She slept, I scarcely slept at all;
Until toward the morning-tide
A dream possessed me with its thrall.
She sweetly breathed; around my breast
I felt her warmth like drowsy bliss,
Then came the vision of unrest,
I saw your face and felt your kiss.
I woke and knew with what dismay
She read my secret and surprise;
She only said, "Again 'tis day!
How red your cheeks, how bright your eyes!"
A Canker In The Heart
by Edward Powys Mathers (As Translator)

I made a bitter song
When I was a boy,
About a girl
With hot earth-coloured hair,
Who lived with me
And left me.
I made a sour song
On her marriage-day,
That ever his kisses
Would be ghosts of mine,
And ever the measure
Of his halting love
Flow to my music.
It was a silly song,
Dear wife with cool black hair,
And yet when I recall
(At night with you asleep)
That once you gave yourself
Before we met,
I do not quite well know
What song to make.
From the Burmese (nineteenth century) (' by Asmapur).
Christmastide
by Emily Pauline Johnson

I may not go to-night to Bethlehem,
Nor follow star-directed ways, nor tread
The paths wherein the shepherds walked, that led
To Christ, and peace, and God's good will to men.
I may not hear the Herald Angel's song
Peal through the Oriental skies, nor see
The wonder of that Heavenly company
Announce the King the world had waited long.
The manger throne I may not kneel before,
Or see how man to God is reconciled,
Through pure St. Mary's purer, holier child;
The human Christ these eyes may not adore.
I may not carry frankincense and myrrh
With adoration to the Holy One;
Nor gold have I to give the Perfect Son,
To be with those wise kings a worshipper.
Not mine the joy that Heaven sent to them,
For ages since Time swung and locked his gates,
But I may kneel without - the star still waits
To guide me on to holy Bethlehem.
Stanzas For Music
by Robert Fuller Murray

I loved a little maiden
In the golden years gone by;
She lived in a mill, as they all do
(There is doubtless a reason why).
But she faded in the autumn
When the leaves began to fade,
And the night before she faded,
These words to me she said:
'Do not forget me, Henry,
Be noble and brave and true;
But I must not bide, for the world is wide,
And the sky above is blue.'
So I said farewell to my darling,
And sailed away and came back;
And the good ship Jane was in port again,
And I found that they all loved Jack.
But Polly and I were sweethearts,
As all the neighbours know,
Before I met with the mill-girl
Twenty years ago.
So I thought I would go and see her,
But alas, she had faded too!
She could not bide, for the world was wide,
And the sky above was blue.
And now I can only remember
The maid--the maid of the mill,
And Polly, and one or two others
In the churchyard over the hill.
And I sadly ask the question,
As I weep in the yew-tree's shade
With my elbow on one of their tombstones,
'Ah, why did they all of them fade?'
And the answer I half expected
Comes from the solemn yew,
'They could none of them bide, for the world was wide,
And the sky above was blue.'
The Sighing Heart
by Edward Powys Mathers (As Translator)

I made search for you all my life, and when I found you
There came a trouble on me,
So that it seemed my blood escaped
And my life ran back from me
And my heart slipped into you.
It seems, also, that you are the moon
And that I am at the top of a tree.
If I had wings I would spread them as far as you,
Dear bud, that will not open
Though the kisses of the holy bird knock at your petal door.
Song of Siam.
Amabel
by Thomas Hardy

I marked her ruined hues,
Her custom-straitened views,
And asked, "Can there indwell
My Amabel?"
I looked upon her gown,
Once rose, now earthen brown;
The change was like the knell
Of Amabel.
Her step's mechanic ways
Had lost the life of May's;
Her laugh, once sweet in swell,
Spoilt Amabel.
I mused: "Who sings the strain
I sang ere warmth did wane?
Who thinks its numbers spell
His Amabel?" -
Knowing that, though Love cease,
Love's race shows undecrease;
All find in dorp or dell
An Amabel.
- I felt that I could creep
To some housetop, and weep,
That Time the tyrant fell
Ruled Amabel!
I said (the while I sighed
That love like ours had died),
"Fond things I'll no more tell
To Amabel,
"But leave her to her fate,
And fling across the gate,
'Till the Last Trump, farewell,
O Amabel!'"
1865.
A Prayer.
by Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

I meant to have but modest needs,
Such as content, and heaven;
Within my income these could lie,
And life and I keep even.
But since the last included both,
It would suffice my prayer
But just for one to stipulate,
And grace would grant the pair.
And so, upon this wise I prayed, --
Great Spirit, give to me
A heaven not so large as yours,
But large enough for me.
A smile suffused Jehovah's face;
The cherubim withdrew;
Grave saints stole out to look at me,
And showed their dimples, too.
I left the place with all my might, --
My prayer away I threw;
The quiet ages picked it up,
And Judgment twinkled, too,
That one so honest be extant
As take the tale for true
That "Whatsoever you shall ask,
Itself be given you."
But I, grown shrewder, scan the skies
With a suspicious air, --
As children, swindled for the first,
All swindlers be, infer.
The Maid's Lament
by Walter Savage Landor

I loved him not; and yet, now he is gone,
I feel I am alone.
I check'd him while he spoke; yet, could he speak,
Alas! I would not check.
For reasons not to love him once I sought,
And wearied all my thought
To vex myself and him: I now would give
My love could he but live
Who lately lived for me, and, when he found
'Twas vain, in holy ground
He hid his face amid the shades of death!
I waste for him my breath
Who wasted his for me! but mine returns,
And this torn bosom burns
With stifling heat, heaving it up in sleep,
And waking me to weep
Tears that had melted his soft heart: for years
Wept he as bitter tears!
Merciful God! such was his latest prayer,
These may she never share.
Quieter is his breath, his breast more cold,
Than daisies in the mould,
Where children spell, athwart the churchyard gate,
His name and life's brief date.
Pray for him, gentle souls, whoe'er you be,
And oh! pray too for me!