Date: December, 1917

"I was of three minds, / Like a tree / In which there are three blackbirds."

— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

Date: November, 1930

"What's in your mind, my dove, my coney; / Do thoughts grow like feathers, the dead end of life; / Is it making of love or counting of money, / Or raid on the jewels, the plans of a thief?"

— Auden, W. H. (1907-1973)

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: 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: 1965

"The ripe brain rotting like a yellow nut / Hatching / Its babel of sea-lice, sandfly, and maggot."

— Walcott, Derek (b. 1930)

Date: 1981

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

— 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...

— Hull, Lynda (1954-1994)

Date: 1988

"Mind in its purest play is like some bat / That beats about in caverns all alone, / Contriving by a kind of senseless wit / Not to conclude against a wall of stone."

— Wilbur, Richard (1921- )

Date: 1988

"The mind is like a bat."

— Wilbur, Richard (1921- )

Date: 1995

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

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)