Date: 1732
"Malice, and Lust, voracious Birds of Prey, / That out-soar Reason, and our Wishes sway; / Desires' wild Seas, on which the wise are tost, / By Pilot Indolence, are safely crost."
preview | full record— Mitchell, Joseph (c. 1684-1738)
Date: 1742
"But their hearts wounded, like the wounded air, / Soon close; where pass'd the shaft, no trace is found. / As from the wing no scar the sky retains, / The parted wave no furrow from the keel, / So dies in human hearts the thought of death."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1773
"But if thou com'st with frown austere / To nurse the brood of care and fear; / To bid our sweetest passions die, / And leave us in their room a sigh; / Or if thine aspect stern have power / To wither each poor transient flower, / That cheers the pilgrimage of woe, / And dry the springs whence ho...
preview | full record— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)
Date: 1790, 1794, 1795, 1818, 1827
"The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind."
preview | full record— Blake, William (1757-1827)
Date: 1820
"And we breathe, and sicken not, / The atmosphere of human thought: / Be it dim, and dank, and gray, / Like a storm-extinguished day, / Travelled o'er by dying gleams; / Be it bright as all between / Cloudless skies and windless streams, / Silent, liquid, and serene; / As the birds within the win...
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: 1824
"'I rose; and, bending at her sweet command, / Touched with faint lips the cup she raised, / And suddenly my brain became as sand / 'Where the first wave had more than half erased / The track of deer on desert Labrador; / Whilst the wolf, from which they fled amazed, / 'Leaves his stamp visibly u...
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: 2003
"How to hold it all at once, / except by passion's climb, / its rising tides & breathless, / hawk's-eye view?"
preview | full record— Spaar, Lisa Russ