Date: 1803
"A Whirlpool swallowing up each awful thought / That Heav'n had stamp'd, or education taught."
preview | full record— Woodhouse, James (bap. 1735, d. 1820)
Date: 1807-8
"So minds debas'd can torture gen'rous acts: / And thus, by terrors haunted, hunger-pinch'd, / Hag-ridden by the demon at their hearts, / Suspicious, tost from thought to thought, they watch'd / The lagging hours of night"
preview | full record— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)
Date: 1850
"This faculty [Imagination/Reason] hath been the feeding source / Of our long labour: we have traced the stream / From the blind cavern whence is faintly heard /Its natal murmur; followed it to light / And open day"
preview | full record— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)
Date: 1850
"Behold an emblem of our human mind / Crowded with thoughts that need a settled home, / Yet, like to eddying balls of foam / Within this whirlpool, they each other chase / Round and round, and neither find / An outlet nor a resting-place!"
preview | full record— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)
Date: 1922
"The joy in your maturity at length, / The peace that filled my soul like cooling wine, / When you responded to my tender strength, / And pressed your heart exulting into mine."
preview | full record— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)
Date: 1946
"Icebergs behoove the soul / (both being self-made from elements least visible) / to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible."
preview | full record— Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)
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."
preview | full record— Le Guin, Ursula (b. 1929)