"
3 September [1939]

[...]
I feel as if I could not write again. Words seem to break in my mind like sticks when I put them down on paper. I cannot see how to spell some of them. Sentences are covered with leaves, and I really cannot see the line of the branch that carries the green meaning.

It so happens that the world has broken just at the moment when my own life has broken..."
{Stephen Spender, Journals 1939-1983, Faber: 1985}