Theme

Jealousy

Attention turned sharp: the fear that the beloved is finite, and already spent elsewhere.

• Taifa-period al-Andalus

  I Go My Way with Pride

  An Umayyad princess-poet in Córdoba took lovers in public and wrote in her own name. The affair with Ibn Zaydūn burned, then tore. She is not his muse. She is the other poet.

• Levant, first millennium BCE

  Rise Up, My Love

  Desire entered the sacred canon and never agreed to leave. Jews and Christians have read it as allegory. The Hebrew still smells of myrrh and the bed at night.

• Sena-period Bengal

  When He Dances Elsewhere

  Jayadeva sings Rādhā’s waiting while Krishna stays among the gopīs. In this poem the sacred and the erotic refuse to be sorted. Viraha is not a plot delay. It is the devotion.

• Lyon, French Renaissance

  Kiss Me Again

  Œuvres de Louïze Labé Lionnoize: sonnets, including “Baise m’encor.” The mouth on the page is certain. Whether one woman of Lyon wrote it is a living scholarly question. The poems survive either way.

• Heian Japan

  A Gossamer Life

  A wife in a polygamous Fujiwara marriage keeps a record of being left to wait. The diary is not a romance of patience. It is what neglect looks like from inside the house.

• Halifax, 1832 to 1840

  Crypthand

  Anne Lister writes a life in code, and on Easter 1834 takes communion with Ann Walker as marriage. The diaries are private, sexual, economic, and sometimes controlling. She is not a series.