Date: 1937

"Figure on her waxen mind / Images of life refin'd."

— Philips, Ambrose (1674-1749)

Date: 1937

"Make [her mind], as a garden gay, / Every bud of thought display, / Till, improving year by year, / The whole culture shall appear,"

— Philips, Ambrose (1674-1749)

Date: 1947

"Thoughts talk to me within / My mind, that shuttered room."

— Sassoon, Siegfried (1886-1967)

Date: 1959, 1964

"run your finger along your no-moss mind / that's not a thought that's soot"

— O'Hara, Francis Russell "Frank" (1926-1966)

Date: 1965

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

— Walcott, Derek (b. 1930)

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: December 2009

"Like an oyster / That cloisters a spoil of pearls, / Untouched— // The heart that’s had / Enough / Stays shut."

— Essbaum, Jill Alexander

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: December 2009

"This stanza become a catacomb or tomb / That serves as a temporary safe deposit / Vault for your perduring lost & found / Mind, which articulately could presume / To ask of being what could cause it, / A question as unanswerable as profound."

— Hine, Daryl (b. 1936)