July 1950 – I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. Now I know how people can live without books, without college. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes living, near the earth. At times like this I’d call myself a fool to ask for more…

Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath

    
















    










Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams; 
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

                                                         William Butler Yeats