Date: 1810

"They form a picture, delicate of trait, / Soft as the scene now mirror'd in thy breast"

— Seward, Anna (1742-1809)

Date: 1825

"Bear thy afflictions with a patient mind; / Whose bursting heart disdains unjust controul, / Who feel'st oppression's iron in thy soul, / Who dragg'st the load of faint and feeble years, / Whose bread is anguish, and whose water tears."

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

Date: 1842

"I think thy breast is meade o' brass"

— Blamire, Susanna (1747-1794)

Date: 1842

"Small cause of triumph can the bravest feel, / For never yet were brave hearts made of steel."

— Blamire, Susanna (1747-1794)

Date: 1862

"My heart within me like a stone / Is numb'd too much for hopes or fears."

— Rossetti, Christina (1830-1894)

Date: 1890

"I've known her from an ample nation / Choose one; / Then close the valves of her attention / Like stone."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1892

"Least village boasts its blacksmith, / Whose anvil's even din / Stands symbol for the finer forge / That soundless tugs within, // Refining these impatient ores / With hammer and with blaze, / Until the designated light / Repudiate the forge."

— 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."

— Smith, Stevie (1902-1971)

Date: 1995

"Soul is the place, / stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind, / where such necessity grinds itself out"

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

Date: 2010

"Yet as I lift up this / dull desert stone, the weight of it is full / of slower, longer thoughts than mind can have."

— Le Guin, Ursula (b. 1929)