Date: 1825
Domestic love may build her nest in the "feeling breast"
preview | full record— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)
Date: April 1861
"My heart is like a singing bird / Whose nest is in a water'd shoot."
preview | full record— Rossetti, Christina (1830-1894)
Date: 1892
"Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without the words, / And never stops at all, // And sweetest in the gale is heard."
preview | full record— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)
Date: 1942
"I shall keep them [my thoughts] to myself for a time, and when I am older / They will shine as a white worm shines under a green boulder."
preview | full record— Smith, Stevie (1902-1971)
Date: 1981
"What's my head but a rat's nest / of dubious texts?"
preview | full record— Harwood, Gwen (1920-1995)
Date: 1986
"But it was only the heart's / racketing flywheel stuttering I want, I want // until exhaustion, until I was a guest in the yoke / of my body by the last margin of land where the river // mingles with the sea & far off daylight whitens, / a rending & yielding I must kneel before, as // bar...
preview | full record— Hull, Lynda (1954-1994)
Date: 1995
Emily Brontë's soul "goes skimming the deep keel like a storm petrel, / out of sight."
preview | full record— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)
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
Date: December 2009
"Like an oyster / That cloisters a spoil of pearls, / Untouched— // The heart that’s had / Enough / Stays shut."
preview | full record— Essbaum, Jill Alexander