DanFosing/public-domain-poetry huggingface dataset:
On A Window At An Inn (Epigrams On Windows)
by Jonathan Swift

We fly from luxury and wealth,
To hardships, in pursuit of health;
From generous wines, and costly fare,
And dozing in an easy-chair;
Pursue the goddess Health in vain,
To find her in a country scene,
And every where her footsteps trace,
And see her marks in every face;
And still her favourites we meet,
Crowding the roads with naked feet.
But, oh! so faintly we pursue,
We ne'er can have her full in view.
Strollers.
by Madison Julius Cawein

I.
We have no castles,
We have no vassals,
We have no riches, no gems and no gold;
Nothing to ponder,
Nothing to squander
Let us go wander
As minstrels of old.
II.
You with your lute, love,
I with my flute, love,
Let us make music by mountain and sea;
You with your glances,
I with my dances,
Singing romances
Of old chivalry.
III.
"Derry down derry!
Good folk, be merry!
Hither, and hearken where happiness is!
Never go borrow
Care of to-morrow,
Never go sorrow
While life hath a kiss."
IV.
Let the day gladden
Or the night sadden,
We will be merry in sunshine or snow;
You with your rhyme, love,
I with my chime, love,
We will make time, love,
Dance as we go.
V.
Nothing is ours,
Only the flowers,
Meadows, and stars, and the heavens above;
Nothing to lie for,
Nothing to sigh for,
Nothing to die for
While still we have love.
VI.
"Derry down derry!
Good folk, be merry!
Hither, and hearken a word that is sooth:
Care ye not any,
If ye have many
Or not a penny,
If still ye have youth!"
The Ships That Won't Go Down
by Henry Lawson

We hear a great commotion
'Bout the ship that comes to grief,
That founders in mid-ocean,
Or is driven on a reef;
Because it's cheap and brittle
A score of sinners drown.
But we hear but mighty little
Of the ships that won't go down.
Here's honour to the builders,
The builders of the past;
Here's honour to the builders
That builded ships to last;
Here's honour to the captain,
And honour to the crew;
Here's double-column headlines
To the ships that battle through.
They make a great sensation
About famous men that fail,
That sink a world of chances
In the city morgue or gaol,
Who drink, or blow their brains out,
Because of "Fortune's frown".
But we hear far too little
Of the men who won't go down.
The world is full of trouble,
And the world is full of wrong,
But the heart of man is noble,
And the heart of man is strong!
They say the sea sings dirges,
But I would say to you
That the wild wave's song's a paean
For the men that battle through.
The Last Meeting
by Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev

We had once been close and warm friends.... But an unlucky moment came ... and we parted as enemies.
Many years passed by.... And coming to the town where he lived, I learnt that he was helplessly ill, and wished to see me.
I made my way to him, went into his room.... Our eyes met.
I hardly knew him. God! what sickness had done to him!
Yellow, wrinkled, completely bald, with a scanty grey beard, he sat clothed in nothing but a shirt purposely slit open.... He could not bear the weight of even the lightest clothes. Jerkily he stretched out to me his fearfully thin hand that looked as if it were gnawed away, with an effort muttered a few indistinct words - whether of welcome or reproach, who can tell? His emaciated chest heaved, and over the dwindled pupils of his kindling eyes rolled two hard-wrung tears of suffering.
My heart sank.... I sat down on a chair beside him, and involuntarily dropping my eyes before the horror and hideousness of it, I too held out my hand.
But it seemed to me that it was not his hand that took hold of me.
It seemed to me that between us is sitting a tall, still, white woman. A long robe shrouds her from head to foot. Her deep, pale eyes look into vacancy; no sound is uttered by her pale, stern lips.
This woman has joined our hands.... She has reconciled us for ever.
Yes.... Death has reconciled us....
April 1878.
A garden
by Helen Beatrix Potter

We have a little garden,
A garden of our own,
And every day we water there
The seeds that we have sown.
We love our little garden,
And tend it with such care,
You will not find a faded leaf
Or blighted blossom there.
The Dead Feast Of The Kol-Folk
by John Greenleaf Whittier

We have opened the door,
Once, twice, thrice!
We have swept the floor,
We have boiled the rice.
Come hither, come hither!
Come from the far lands,
Come from the star lands,
Come as before!
We lived long together,
We loved one another;
Come back to our life.
Come father, come mother,
Come sister and brother,
Child, husband, and wife,
For you we are sighing.
Come take your old places,
Come look in our faces,
The dead on the dying,
Come home!
We have opened the door,
Once, twice, thrice!
We have kindled the coals,
And we boil the rice
For the feast of souls.
Come hither, come hither!
Think not we fear you,
Whose hearts are so near you.
Come tenderly thought on,
Come all unforgotten,
Come from the shadow-lands,
From the dim meadow-lands
Where the pale grasses bend
Low to our sighing.
Come father, come mother,
Come sister and brother,
Come husband and friend,
The dead to the dying,
Come home!
We have opened the door
You entered so oft;
For the feast of souls
We have kindled the coals,
And we boil the rice soft.
Come you who are dearest
To us who are nearest,
Come hither, come hither,
From out the wild weather;
The storm clouds are flying,
The peepul is sighing;
Come in from the rain.
Come father, come mother,
Come sister and brother,
Come husband and lover,
Beneath our roof-cover.
Look on us again,
The dead on the dying,
Come home!
We have opened the door!
For the feast of souls
We have kindled the coals
We may kindle no more!
Snake, fever, and famine,
The curse of the Brahmin,
The sun and the dew,
They burn us, they bite us,
They waste us and smite us;
Our days are but few
In strange lands far yonder
To wonder and wander
We hasten to you.
List then to our sighing,
While yet we are here
Nor seeing nor hearing,
We wait without fearing,
To feel you draw near.
O dead, to the dying
Come home
When Helen Lived
by William Butler Yeats

We have cried in our despair
That men desert,
For some trivial affair
Or noisy, insolent, sport,
Beauty that we have won
From bitterest hours;
Yet we, had we walked within
Those topless towers
Where Helen walked with her boy,
Had given but as the rest
Of the men and women of Troy,
A word and a jest.
Marie
by John Kendall (Dum-Dum)

In Several Keys
We hear the opening refrain,
Marie!
We thought so; here you are again,
Marie!
A simple tune, in simple thirds,
Beloved of after-dinner birds;
A legend, self-condemned as 'words,'
Marie!
She lingers by the flowing tide,
Marie;
A 'fisher-lad' is close beside
Marie;
He gazes in her 'eyes so blue';
Marie, Marie, my heart is true;
And then, - you do, you know you do,
Marie! - 
But vain is every mortal wish,
Marie;
And 'fisher-lads' have got to fish,
Marie;
O blinding tears! O cheeks 'so' wet!
Marie, I come again! And yet
I shouldn't feel disposed to bet,
Marie!
A tempest drives across the wave,
Marie;
With triplets in the treble stave,
Marie;
The player pounds. With bulging eyes
Th' excited vocalist replies;
The maddened octaves drown his cries,
Marie!
The storm is past. We hear again,
Marie,
The simple thirds, the waltz refrain,
Marie;
We only see some drifting wrack,
An empty bunk, a battered smack,
Alas! Alas!! Alack!!! Alack!!!!
Marie!
O good old words, O 'tears that rise,'
Marie!
O good young fisher-lad that dies,
Marie!
We leave you on the lonely shore; - 
You wave your hands for evermore,
A bleak, disgusted semaphore,
Marie!
The Dykes
by Rudyard Kipling

We have no heart for the fishing, we have no hand for the oar,
All that our fathers taught us of old pleases us no more.
All that our own hearts bid us believe we doubt where we do not deny,
There is nor proof in the bread we eat nor rest in the toil we ply.
Look you, our foreshore stretches far through sea-gate, dyke and groin,
Made land all, that our fathers made, where the flats and the fairway join.
They forced the sea a sea-league back. They died, and their work stood fast.
We were born to peace in the lee of the dykes, but the time of our peace is past.
Far off, the full tide clambers and slips, mouthing and resting all,
Nipping the flanks of the water-gates, baying along the wall;
Turning the shingle, returning the shingle, changing the set of the sand....
We are too far from the beach, men say, to know how the outwarks stand.
So we come down, uneasy, to look; uneasily pacing the beach.
These are the dykes our fathers made: we have never known a breach.
Time and again has the gale blown by and we were not afraid;
Now we come only to look at the dykes, at the dykes our fathers made.
O'er the marsh where the homesteads cower apart the harried sunlight flies,
Shifts and considers, wanes and recovers, scatters and sickness and dies,
An evil ember bedded in ash, a spark blown west by wind ....
We are surrendered to night and the sea, the gale and the tide behind!
At the bridge of the lower saltings the cattle gather and blare, 
Roused by the feet of running men, dazed by the lantern-glare.
Unbar and let them away for their lives, the levels drown as they stand,
Where the flood-wash forces the sluices aback and the ditches deliver inland.
Ninefold deep to the top of the dykes the galloping breakers stride,
And their overcarried spray is a sea, a sea of the landward side.
Coming, like stallions they paw with their hooves, going they snatch with their teeth,
Till the bents and the furze and the sand are dragged out, and the old-time hurdles are beneath.
Bid men gather fuel for fire, the tar, the oil and tow,
Flame we shall need, not smoke, in the dark if the riddled sea-banks go.
Bid the ringers watch in the tower (who know how the dawn shall prove?)
Each with his rope between his feet and the trembling bells above.
Now we can only wait till the day, wait and apportion our shame.
These are the dykes our fathers left, but we would not look to the same.
Time and again were we warned of the dykes, time and again we delayed.
Now, it may fall, we have slain our sons, as our fathers we have betrayed.
***************************************
Walking along the wreck of the dykes, watching the works of the sea!
These were the dykes our fathers made to our great profit and ease.
But the peace is gone and the profit is gone, with the old sure days withdrawn ....
That our own houses show as strange when we come back in the dawn
Song Of The Wheat
by Banjo Paterson (Andrew Barton)

We have sung the song of the droving days,
Of the march of the travelling sheep,
How by silent stages and lonely ways
Thin, white battalions creep.
But the man who now by the land would thrive
Must his spurs to a ploughshare beat;
And the bush bard, changing his tune, may strive
To sing the song if the Wheat!
It's west by south of the Great Divide
The grim grey plains run out,
Where the old flock-masters lived and died
In a ceaseless fight with drought.
Weary with waiting and hope deferred
They were ready to own defeat,
Till at last they heard the master-word,
And the master-word was Wheat.
Yarran and Myall and Box and Pine,
'Twas axe and fire for all;
They scarce could tarry to blaze the line
Or wait for the trees to fall
Ere the team was yoked, and the gates flung wide,
And the dust of the horses' feet
Rose up like a pillar of smoke to guide
The wonderful march of Wheat.
Furrow by furrow, and fold by fold,
The soil is turned on the plain;
Better than silver and better than gold
Is the surface-mine of the grain.
Better than cattle and better than sheep
In the fight with drought and heat;
For a streak of stubbornness, wide and deep,
Lies hid in a grain of Wheat.
When the stock is swept by the hand of fate,
Deep down on his bed of clay
The brave brown Wheat will die and wait
For the resurrection day,
Lie hid while the whole world thinks him dead;
But the Spring-rain, soft and sweet,
Will over the steaming paddocks spread
The first green flush of the Wheat.
Green and amber and gold it grows
When the sun sinks late in the West;
And the breeze sweeps over the rippling rows
Where the quail and the skylark nest.
Mountain or river or shining star,
There's never a sight can beat,
Away to the sky-line stretching far,
A sea of the ripening Wheat.
When the burning harvest sun sinks low,
And shadows stretch on the plain,
The roaring strippers come and go
Like ships on a sea of grain.
Till the lurching, groaning waggons bear
Their tale of the load complete.
Of the world's great work he has done his share
Who has garnered a crop of wheat.
Princes, Potentates, Kings and Czars,
They travel in regal state,
But old King Wheat has a thousand cars
For his trip to the water-gate;
And his thousand steamships breast the tide
And plough through the wind and sleet
To the lands where the teeming millions bide
That say: "Thank God for the Wheat!"
Sixties Hangover
by Paul Cameron Brown

"We have all been here before.
almost cut my hair;"
the refrain from Crosby, Stills. Nash & Young
reading more like a law firm letterhead than
any invocation for real social change.
Respectability, that first casualty of the eighties.
What, exactly, was a true child of the sixties?
Here's a few safe bets:
Valedictorians were few and difficult to find for their "irrelevant,"
high school peers. Are you listening Paul and Paula?
Cutoffs. Hitchhiking to California?
All is beautiful. Laid back. Beads.
The sixties were a jukebox that came of age.
Ponderosa shirts were destined to outlive their owners.
Thirty-three is perilously close to being afraid.
Elvis Presley, a blimp at forty, missed the sixties or rather
failed to live them down.
The hullabaloo of freedom was taken for granted, then shelved.
Amid a crescendo of killing only a year and one half of the present
decade duplicates the assassinations of the "violent sixties."
Even the cop troupe withered, crooned Eric Burton at Monterrey.
I think not.
England
by William Henry Davies

We have no grass locked up in ice so fast
That cattle cut their faces and at last,
When it is reached, must lie them down and starve,
With bleeding mouths that freeze too hard to move.
We have not that delirious state of cold
That makes men warm and sing when in Death's hold.
We have no roaring floods whose angry shocks
Can kill the fishes dashed against their rocks.
We have no winds that cut down street by street,
As easy as our scythes can cut down wheat.
No mountains here to spew their burning hearts
Into the valleys, on our human parts.
No earthquakes here, that ring church bells afar,
A hundred miles from where those earthquakes are.
We have no cause to set our dreaming eyes,
Like Arabs, on fresh streams in Paradise.
We have no wilds to harbour men that tell
More murders than they can remember well.
No woman here shall wake from her night's rest,
To find a snake is sucking at her breast.
Though I have travelled many and many a mile,
And had a man to clean my boots and smile
With teeth that had less bone in them than gold -
Give me this England now for all my world.
April Love
by Ernest Christopher Dowson

We have walked in Love's land a little way,
We have learnt his lesson a little while,
And shall we not part at the end of day,
With a sigh, a smile?
A little while in the shine of the sun,
We were twined together, joined lips, forgot
How the shadows fall when the day is done,
And when Love is not.
We have made no vows--there will none be broke,
Our love was free as the wind on the hill,
There was no word said we need wish unspoke,
We have wrought no ill.
So shall we not part at the end of day,
Who have loved and lingered a little while,
Join lips for the last time, go our way,
With a sigh, a smile?
Shelly.
by James McIntyre

We have scarcely time to tell thee
Of the strange and gifted Shelly,
Kind hearted man but ill-fated,
So youthful, drowned and cremated.
For Four Guilds: III. The Stone-Masons
by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

We have graven the mountain of God with hands,
As our hands were graven of God, they say,
Where the seraphs burn in the sun like brands
And the devils carry the rains away;
Making a thrift of the throats of hell,
Our gargoyles gather the roaring rain,
Whose yawn is more than a frozen yell
And their very vomiting not in vain.
Wilder than all that a tongue can utter,
Wiser than all that is told in words,
The wings of stone of the soaring gutter
Fly out and follow the flight of the birds;
The rush and rout of the angel wars
Stand out above the astounded street,
Where we flung our gutters against the stars
For a sign that the first and the last shall meet.
We have graven the forest of heaven with hands,
Being great with a mirth too gross for pride,
In the stone that battered him Stephen stands
And Peter himself is petrified:
Such hands as have grubbed in the glebe for bread
Have bidden the blank rock blossom and thrive,
Such hands as have stricken a live man dead
Have struck, and stricken the dead alive.
Fold your hands before heaven in praying,
Lift up your hands into heaven and cry;
But look where our dizziest spires are saying
What the hands of a man did up in the sky:
Drenched before you have heard the thunder,
White before you have felt the snow;
For the giants lift up their hands to wonder
How high the hands of a man could go.
Celts And Saxons.[1]
by Thomas Osborne Davis

I.
We hate the Saxon and the Dane,
We hate the Norman men--
We cursed their greed for blood and gain,
We curse them now again.
Yet start not, Irish-born man!
If you're to Ireland true,
We heed not blood, nor creed, nor clan--
We have no curse for you.
II.
We have no curse for you or yours,
But Friendship's ready grasp,
And Faith to stand by you and yours
Unto our latest gasp--
To stand by you against all foes,
Howe'er, or whence they come,
With traitor arts, or bribes, or blows,
From England, France, or Rome.
III.
What matter that at different shrines
We pray unto one God?
What matter that at different times
Your fathers won this sod?
In fortune and in name we're bound
By stronger links than steel;
And neither can be safe nor sound
But in the other's weal.
IV.
As Nubian rocks, and Ethiop sand
Long drifting down the Nile,
Built up old Egypt's fertile land
For many a hundred mile,
So Pagan clans to Ireland came,
And clans of Christendom,
Yet joined their wisdom and their fame
To build a nation from.
V.
Here came the brown Phoenician,
The man of trade and toil--
Here came the proud Milesian,
A hungering for spoil;
And the Firbolg and the Cymry,
And the hard, enduring Dane,
And the iron Lords of Normandy,
With the Saxons in their train.
VI.
And oh! it were a gallant deed
To show before mankind,
How every race and every creed
Might be by love combined--
Might be combined, yet not forget
The fountains whence they rose,
As, filled by many a rivulet,
The stately Shannon flows.
VII.
Nor would we wreak our ancient feud
On Belgian or on Dane,
Nor visit in a hostile mood
The hearths of Gaul or Spain;
But long as on our country lies
The Anglo-Norman yoke,
Their tyranny we'll stigmatize,
And God's revenge invoke.
VIII.
We do not hate, we never cursed,
Nor spoke a foeman's word
Against a man in Ireland nursed,
Howe'er we thought he erred;
So start not, Irish-born man,
If you're to Ireland true,
We heed not race, nor creed, nor clan,
We've hearts and hands for you.
Statio Quarta
by Thomas Edward Brown

We have not seen the sun for many days,
But now through East-wind haze
He makes a shift
To send a luminous drift,
To which, as to his full unclouded splendour,
The meek, contented earth makes glad surrender.
God bless the simple earth
That gave me birth!
God bless her that she looks so pleased,
The soul thai is diseased
With this world's sorrow,
Well, sir? ought to look?
Beyond, and yet beyond: not in this narrow nook of His creation
Will God make up His book.
The whole is one great scheme of compensation
The net result
Is all . . . I too have had my dream,
As from my nonage dedicate a meustgx
Of that great cult.
I saw Lord Love upon his galley pass
Westward from Cyprus; smooth as glass
The sea was all before him. He, as keleustgx
Stood at the stern, and piped
The rhythms; but, ever and anon,
As worked upon
By some familiar Fury, grasping a scourge
(An amethyst
Fastened it to his wrist . . . Love's wrist!),
He ran along the transtra, and did urge
The rowers, and striped
Their backs with blood; whereat they leapt
Like maddened hounds, and swept
The sea until it hissed.
Then I: "Lord Love, what means this cruelty?"
But he to me
Deigned no reply:
Only I saw his face was wet with tears,
And he did look" beyond, and yet beyond."
But those men, fond
And fatuous, never turned
Their eyes from his, but yearned
With an insensate yearning, having confidence
That so it must be; but on what pretence
I know not, Ah, most cruel lord!
Ah, knotted cord!
Dull plashm
Of livid tissues! flash
Of oars that smote the waters to a hum . .
Come, come!
You've had enough of this,
But what I meant, and what you seemed to miss,
Was simply how the meek, contented earth,
That gave me birth,
Was pleased . .
Then you of soul diseased,
And what not . . . excellent!
But that is what I meant.
Song. - Clara And I.
by Charles Sangster

We have a joke whenever we meet,
Clara and I;
Prattle and laughter, and kisses sweet,
Clara and I.
Were I but twenty, and not two score,
Clara and I would laugh still more,
With plenty of hopeful years in store
For Clara and I, Clara and I;
With plenty of hopeful years in store
For Clara and I.
We will be true as Damascus steel,
Clara and I;
Sealing our truth with a honied seal,
Clara and I.
Eyes so loving, and lips of rose,
Cheeks where the dainty ripe peach grows,
And mouth where the sly god smiles jocose
At Clara and I, Clara and I;
And mouth where the sly god smiles jocose
At Clara and I.
We have a kiss whenever we part,
Clara and I;
Grasping of hand, and flutter of heart,
Clara and I.
Were she but twenty, and not sixteen,
Over my love she'd reign the queen,
And no fair rival should come between
My Clara and I, Clara and I;
And no fair rival should come between
My Clara and I.
Drapier'S-Hill.[1]
by Jonathan Swift

We give the world to understand,
Our thriving Dean has purchased land;
A purchase which will bring him clear
Above his rent four pounds a-year;
Provided to improve the ground,
He will but add two hundred pound;
And from his endless hoarded store,
To build a house, five hundred more.
Sir Arthur, too, shall have his will,
And call the mansion Drapier's-Hill;
That, when a nation, long enslaved,
Forgets by whom it once was saved;
When none the Drapier's praise shall sing,
His signs aloft no longer swing,
His medals and his prints forgotten,
And all his handkerchiefs [2] are rotten,
His famous letters made waste paper,
This hill may keep the name of Drapier;
In spite of envy, flourish still,
And Drapier's vie with Cooper's-Hill.
Hyde Park At Night, Before The War
by D. H. Lawrence (David Herbert Richards)

Clerks.
We have shut the doors behind us, and the velvet flowers of night
Lean about us scattering their pollen grains of golden light.
Now at last we lift our faces, and our faces come aflower
To the night that takes us willing, liberates us to the hour.
Now at last the ink and dudgeon passes from our fervent eyes
And out of the chambered weariness wanders a spirit abroad on its enterprise.
Not too near and not too far
Out of the stress of the crowd
Music screams as elephants scream
When they lift their trunks and scream aloud
For joy of the night when masters are
Asleep and adream.
So here I hide in the Shalimar
With a wanton princess slender and proud,
And we swoon with kisses, swoon till we seem
Two streaming peacocks gone in a cloud
Of golden dust, with star after star
On our stream.
We Two In A Park At Night
by Edward Powys Mathers (As Translator)

We have walked over the high grass under the wet trees
To the gravel path beside the lake, we two.
A noise of light-stepping shadows follows now
From the dark green mist in which we waded.
Six geese drop one by one into the shivering lake;
They say "Peeng" and then after a long time, "Peeng,"
Swimming out softly to the moon.
Three of the balancing dancing geese are dim and black,
And three are white and clear because of the moon;
In what explanatory dawn will our souls
Be seen to be the same?
From the Chinese of J. Wing (nineteenth century).