Anish Kapoor’s Sky Mirror, Nottingham Playhouse, Nottingham, NG1

Into his heart; he never felt
The witching of the soft blue sky!

From William Wordsworth’s Peter Bell (1888)

Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 4525 Oak Street, Kansas City, MO

From Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819)

Weymouth Terrace, Bethnal Green, Tower Hamlets, E2

The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see.

From Francis Pharcellus Church’s Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus (1897)

Dunston Road, Haggerston, Hackey, E8

Fashion’d by long forgotten hands.

From Lord Byron’s Siege of Corinth (1816)

Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children, Hackney Road, Tower Hamlets, E2

We see no white-winged angels now.

Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children, Hackney Road, Tower Hamlets, E2

But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.

Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children, Hackney Road, Tower Hamlets, E2

From George Eliot’s Silas Marmer (1861)

Pyramid of Menkaure, Al Ahram, Giza, Egypt

And shook within their pyramids to hear
A new Cambyses thundering in their ear…

From Lord Byron’s The Age of Bronze (1823)

King Street, Southall, Ealing, UB2

“Drunk for ten years.”

From F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Lost Decade (1939)

Liverpool Anglican Cathedral, St James Mount, Liverpool, Merseyside, L1

Which men weep over may be meant to save.

From Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1818-1824)

Monument to the Battle of the Nation (Völkerschlachtdenkmal), Straße des 18. Oktober, 04227 Leipzig, Germany

The more the marble wastes,
The more the statue grows.

From Michelangelo’s sonnet addressed to Vittoria Colonna (translated 1868)

Richard Meier & Partners’ Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Plaça dels Àngels, Barcelona, Spain

Oh, black bull of sorrow!

From Federico García Lorca’s Weeping for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1935)