Theme

Grief

What love becomes when it can no longer be answered in the present tense.

• Early Mesopotamia

  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.

• Twelfth-century Paris

  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.

• Tang dynasty

  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.

• England and Rome, 1819 to 1821

  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.

• Washington, July 1861

  If I Do Not Return

  A week before First Bull Run, Major Sullivan Ballou writes to Sarah. The letter became famous. The war was not beautiful, and the famous text may not be the one his hand first made.