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Date: 1825

Domestic love may build her nest in the "feeling breast"

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

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Date: April 1861

"My heart is like a singing bird / Whose nest is in a water'd shoot."

— Rossetti, Christina (1830-1894)

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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."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

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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."

— Smith, Stevie (1902-1971)

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Date: 1981

"What's my head but a rat's nest / of dubious texts?"

— Harwood, Gwen (1920-1995)

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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...

— Hull, Lynda (1954-1994)

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Date: 1995

Emily Brontë's soul "goes skimming the deep keel like a storm petrel, / out of sight."

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

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Date: 2003

"How to hold it all at once, / except by passion's climb, / its rising tides & breathless, / hawk's-eye view?"

— Spaar, Lisa Russ

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Date: December 2009

"Like an oyster / That cloisters a spoil of pearls, / Untouched— // The heart that’s had / Enough / Stays shut."

— Essbaum, Jill Alexander

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.