I dreamed of snowflakes and kisses under the mistletoe.

Hungry, pitiless, murderous sea!
Oh, what wild shrieks hath terror sent o'er thee!
    How many millions, dead,
    Lie waiting in thy oozy bed,
Till the last trumpet sound, and Death no more
Shall revel 'mid thy rage and maddening roar!
—Nicholas Michell, "Ocean's Changes" (1867)

The conclusion of the "hermit's" fragments, from Punch, 1842.

You can feel the pulse
in the slipping away
—Geof Huth

"Story over," a dog-eared poem created by Google's scan of Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, Sept. 1892.

"A poet's work . . . to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep."
—Salman Rushdie

"The poetic art is no more and no less than the repayment of old debts to life and to the mystery of life."
—Vítězslav Nezval, in his foreword to Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

"At times I had thought of writing poetry myself but getting words to rhyme with each other is difficult, like trying to drive a herd of turkeys and kangaroos down a crowded thoroughfare and keep them neatly together without looking in shop windows.  There are so many words, and they all mean something."
—Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

A hand without fingerprints
still leaves a smudge
—Geof Huth

For an acquaintance who dreams of lazy afternoons in a hammock but whose backyard sports just a single tree, here's a spoof of a poem by dear cousin Emily:

To make a hammock
It takes some netting and one tree.
Netting and a tree
And reverie.
The reverie alone will do
If trees are few.

Here's our translation of the Xs and Os of this book cover, using The X-O-Skeleton Story Generator.  As we don't know the order of play, we read the letters row by row, left to right:

From our Magic Words outpost at Blogger:

"[John Milton's] poetry acts like an incantation.  Its merit lies less in its obvious meaning than in its occult power, and there would seem at first to be no more in his words than in other words.  But they are words of enchantment.  No sooner are they pronounced than the past is present and the distant near.  New forms of beauty start at once into existence, and all the burial-places of the memory give up their dead."
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, Essay on Milton

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

A whimsical bit of misinformation from DR. BOLI’S ANIMAL ALPHABET:

Also don't miss Dr. Boli's explanation of a unicorn's chief source of income.

The Serif of Nottingblog offers today's Tic Tac Toe-generated poem.

"The Shortest Day"

Short verse
    We need,
Most terse
    Indeed,
That it—
    This lay—
May fit
    This day.
Short sight
    Of sun.
Long night,
    Begun
At four,
    Sunshine
Once more
    At nine.
A. M.
    Meets eyes
Of them
    Who rise
If no
    Fog hide—
Then woe
    Betide;
The day
    That ought
To stay
    So short
A space
    Can't show
Its face
    Below.
But when
    It goes,
Why then
    One knows
New Year
    Will soon
Be here—
    Then June,
So bright!
    So sweet!
So light!
    We'll greet
The day
    That's long
With gay,
    Glad song—
Excessively long-footed verse will undoubtedly characterise what
            we say,
For Longfellow's longest lines skip along when we've long longed
            for the Longest Day.

—Punch, Dec. 24, 1892