Date: 1795

"Still to be serious, Pitt, before we part: / Let Mercy melt the mill-stone of thy heart."

— Wolcot, John, pseud. Peter Pindar, (1738-1819)

Date: 1800

"Piece of the nether millstone is his heart / Who marks ill-pleas'd the frolic of the child, / Or views the rural festival unmov'd."

— Hurdis, James (1763-1801)

Date: 1800,1806

"Thrice he rose, and thrice / His feet recoil'd; and still the livid flame / Lengthen'd and quiver'd as the moaning wind / Pass'd thro' the rushy crevice, while his heart / Beat, like the death-watch, in his shudd'ring breast."

— Robinson [Née Darby], Mary [Perdita] (1758-1800)

Date: w. 1797-1807, published 1893

"So shall [you] govern over all let Moral Duty tune your tongue*But be your hearts harder than the nether millstone"

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1890

"The brain within its groove / Runs evenly and true."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1965

"The younger machines occupy miles of dark benches, / Enjoying self-induced vacations of the mind, / Eating textbook rinds, spitting culture seeds, / Dreaming an exotic name to give their latest defeat, / Computing the hours on computer minds."

— Kaufman, Bob (1925-1986)

Date: 1968

"Like a clock whose hands are sweeping / Past the minutes of its face, / And the world is like an apple / Whirling silently in space, / Like the circles that you find / In the windmills of your mind!"

— Bergman, Alan (b. 1925) and Marilyn Bergman [née Keith] (b.1929)

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: 1989

"we all rose / every black one of us still alive / and went to meet that man / the same man who had erased our blackboard, crashed our computer heads, / burned our books and cooked our elders in superstitions and trivial / remembrances slave traders called fairytales from when massa was animals"

— Kalamu ya Salaam (b. 1947)

Date: April 21, 2014

"The old gag about LPs being like gasoline / Puddles that go up and dizzy us / With their fumes, and of middle age / Rotating us out of Earth's orbit, stars like / A corrupted computer file / And the forgetful mind, a red-topped / Tupperware when we were young / Now without gravity or capacity li...

— Greenbaum, Jessica