Date: 1900

"But thought that strives to reunite / In polished facets of the mind / The broken colours of the light / Baffled in mists of human kind."

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

Date: 1922

"I plucked my soul out of its secret place, / And held it to the mirror of my eye, / To see it like a star against the sky, / A twitching body quivering in space, / A spark of passion shining on my face."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

Date: 1922

"All night, through the eternity of night, / Pain was my portion though I could not feel. / Deep in my humbled heart you ground your heel, / Till I was reft of even my inner light, / Till reason from my mind had taken flight, / And all my world went whirling in a reel."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

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: 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)

Date: 1955, 1958

"It will be dark out there / with the Salvation Army Band. / And the mind its own illumination."

— Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. (b. 1919)

Date: 1990

"The noise the body makes / when the body meets / the soul over the soul's ocean and penumbra / is the old sound of up-and-down, in-and-out, / a lump of muscle chug-chugging blood / into the ear; a lover's / heart-shaped tongue; / flesh rocking flesh until flesh comes; / the butcher working / at ...

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)