Date: 1791, 1806

"Oh! horrid Night! / Thou prying Monitor confest! / Whose key unlocks the human breast, / And bares each avenue to mental sight!"

— Robinson [Née Darby], Mary [Perdita] (1758-1800)

Date: 1797

"Light of the world, whose cheering ray / Illumes the realms of mind"

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

Date: 1812

The realms of mind are ruled by shades

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

Date: 1814

"Not all the woes of guilty souls combined, / Exceed thy 'leafless desart of the mind'"

— Grant [née MacVicar], Anne (1755-1838)

Date: 1892

"The thought beneath so slight a film / Is more distinctly seen,-- / As laces just reveal the surge, / Or mists the Apennine."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1892

"The broadest land that grows / Is not so ample as the breast / These emerald seams enclose."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1921

"I know what my heart is like / Since your love died: / It is like a hollow ledge / Holding a little pool / Left there by the tide, / A little tepid pool, / Drying inward from the edge."

— Millay, Edna St. Vincent (1892-1950)

Date: w. c. 1864, published 1929

"Experience is the Angled Road / Preferred against the Mind / By -- Paradox -- the Mind itself -- / Presuming it to lead."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 2014

"No, it's a strange beach; each body is a strange beach, and if you let in the excess emotion you will recall the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2017

"There was a snowstorm that lasted three days / and a cavern of monochrome memory"

— Burt, Stephanie