A question

What does grief reveal?

Not only that we loved. Sometimes, the shape of the love, its rank, its unfinished sentence, the room it had already built.

• The Shepherd in the Dry Season

  Before the year can turn, the shepherd has to go down. Sumerian tablets keep the sacred marriage and the lament in one religion. They are not a romance that ends well.

• Héloïse Will Not Be a Plot

  A teacher, a student, a secret marriage, then a mutilation. The Latin that survives is not a romance. It is her refusal to let desire be converted into a useful wound.

• Everlasting Sorrow

  Bai Juyi made an emperor’s passion into the most famous elegy in Chinese. Yang Yuhuan died at Mawei because soldiers demanded a death. The poem is already elegy. It is also imperial self-pity. Say both.

• Two Luxuries

  John Keats writes to Fanny Brawne of her loveliness and of the hour of his death. The first is the love. The second is a fact he could not bargain with.