Date: 1821

"I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar; / Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, / The soul of Adonais, like a star, / Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1821

"A godlike mind soars forth, in its delight / Making earth bare and veiling heaven, and when / It sinks, the swarms that dimmed or shared its light / Leave to its kindred lamps the spirit's awful night."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1822

"He rose / Disturbed and frowning, for tumultuous thoughts / Crowded like night upon his heart"

— Bowles, William Lisle (1762-1850)

Date: 1848

"O that our dreamings all, of sleep or wake, / Would all their colours from the sunset take: / From something of material sublime, / Rather than shadow our own soul's day-time / In the dark void of night."

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

Date: 1850

"An auxiliar light / Came from my mind, which on the setting sun / Bestowed new splendour"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1883

"Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars / With memory of the old revolt from Awe, / He reached a middle height, and at the stars, / Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank"

— Meredith, George (1828-1909)

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: 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)