Theme

Separation

Not the end of love. The climate in which some of its oldest poems were grown.

• Gupta-period India

  The Cloud Messenger

  An exile on a hill asks the monsoon to carry a message to a wife on a mythic mountain. The route is half the poem. Distance is not what the lovers suffer. It is what the verse is made of.

• 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.

• 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.

• High Roman Empire

  The Empty Threshold

  She is in Campania for her health. He rereads her letters, walks to the room where she sat, and writes as if the wax could keep her. Her side of the correspondence does not survive.