Date: 1807

"The music in my heart I bore / Long after it was heard no more."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1892

"Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without the words, / And never stops at all, // And sweetest in the gale is heard."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: December 2009

"To keep your cell the way you keep your soul, / Untidy-minded, neither soiled nor sold / For next to nothing, a treasury of old / Notions like the notes of a piano-roll / Which cannot improvise though it knows a whole / Repertoire, what ought one to withhold?"

— Hine, Daryl (b. 1936)

Date: 2010

"A thought to mind, so to the string / plucked, or touched, or bowed, the music is, / a wrinkling of the air as immaterial / and brief as sunlight glancing on a wave."

— Le Guin, Ursula (b. 1929)