Date: September, 1934

"When the mind is dark with the multiple shadows of facts, / There is no heat of the sun can warm the mind."

— Miles, Josephine (1911-1985)

Date: September, 1934

"This weight of knowledge dark on the brain is never / To be burnt out like fever, // But will slowly, with speech to tell the way and ease it, / Will sink into the blood, and warm, and slowly / Move in the veins, and murmur, and come at length / To the tongue's tip and the finger's tip most lowl...

— Miles, Josephine (1911-1985)

Date: w. 1936, 1938

"The year plunges into night / and the heart plunges / lower than night // to an empty, windswept place / without sun, stars or moon / but a peculiar light as of thought // that spins a dark fire-- / whirling upon itself until, / in the cold, it kindles // to make a man aware of nothing / that he...

— Williams, William Carlos (1883-1963)

Date: 1936

"Lids closed, the eyes are watchful; the brain / carefully stalks the thought like a tiger / following the accurately-scented prey / through tangled jungle foliage."

— Edwin Rolfe (1909-1954)

Date: 1936

"The way / to certainty is charted now, / the sensitive ears alive to sound, / antennae poised for touch, and in the head / all tissue quivering like violin strings."

— Edwin Rolfe (1909-1954)

Date: 1938

"Listen, kids who die-- / Maybe, now, there will be no monument for you / Except in our hearts / Maybe your bodies’ll be lost in a swamp / Or a prison grave, or the potter’s field, / Or the rivers where you’re drowned like Leibknecht / But the day will come-- / Your are sure yourselves that it is...

— Hughes, Langston (1902-1967))

Date: 1942

"The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind, / If one may say so."

— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

Date: December, 1942

"Do we act or do we think / when years roll round on a barber's pole, / when what is red is white is pink, / which is body which is soul?"

— Smith, William Jay (1918-2015)

Date: 1946

"Icebergs behoove the soul / (both being self-made from elements least visible) / to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible."

— Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)

Date: 1946

"his brain appears, throned in "fantastic triumph," / and shines through his hat / with jeweled works at work at intermeshing crowns, / lamé with lights."

— Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)