Phillip Larkin - "To Failure"

• It is these sunless afternoons, I find
• Install you at my elbow like a bore
• The chestnut trees are caked with silence. I'm
• Aware the days pass quicker than before,
• Smell staler too. And once they fall behind
• They look like ruin. You have been here some time.

Rainer Maria Rilke - "Der Panter"

• His sight from ever gazing through the bars
• has grown so blunt that it sees nothing more.
• It seems to him that thousand of bars are
• before him, and behind him nothing merely.

Wallace Stevens - "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts"

• The difficulty to think at the end of day,
• When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
• And nothing is left except light on your fur—
• There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
• Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
• And August the most peaceful month.
• To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
• Without that monument of cat,
• The cat forgotten on the moon;
• And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light
• In which everything is meant for you
• And nothing need be explained;
• Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
• And east rushes west and west rushes down,
• No matter. The grass is full
• And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
• The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
• A self that touches all edges,
• You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
• The red cat hides away in the fur-light
• And there you are humped high, humped up,
• You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
• You sit with your head like a carving in space
• And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.