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Date: 1900

"Whence comes our instinct, that behind / The flimsy furniture of sense / Inheres the undiscovered Mind / From which the world had emanence?"

— Money-Coutts, Francis Burdett Thomas, 5th Lord Latimer (1852-1923)

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Date: 1912

"Famous garden where the passion, / Bursting first disclosed the morn / Whose effulgent, beaming glory / Cleft old Chaos, brain and spine; / Lit up incense burning shrine, / In the heart of man for Eve."

— Beadle, Samuel Alfred (1857-1932)

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Date: 1929

"And Shelley had his towers, thought's crowned powers he called them once."

— Yeats, W. B. (1865-1939)

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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))

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Date: 1940

"The provinces of his body revolted, / The squares of his mind were empty, / Silence invaded the suburbs, / The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers."

— Auden, W. H. (1907-1973)

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Date: 1946

"John, Matthew, Luke and Mark, / Gospel me to the Garden, let me come / Where Mary twists the warlock with her flowers— / Her soul a bridal chamber fresh with flowers / And her whole body an ecstatic womb, / As through the trellis peers the sudden Bridegroom."

— Lowell, Robert (1917-1977)

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Date: 1955

"The courtyards of the inner heart go round / And round, so sure are they / Where they will end; the brick / Convolutions enter and extend / The individual life, and come to end."

— Miles, Josephine (1911-1985)

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Date: 1959

"Look, the fixed stars, all just alike / as lack-land atoms split apart, / and the Republic summons Ike, / the mausoleum in her heart."

— Lowell, Robert (1917-1977)

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Date: 1959

"And I believe in the spurred flame, / Those racing tongues, but cannot come / Out of my heart's unbroken room."

— Hill, Geoffrey (b. 1932)

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Date: 1980

"The back of the mind is a small hotel / And when the residents go on picnics / Or take buckets and spades down to the sea / The betrayals begin."

— Longley, Michael (b. 1939)

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