Theme

Unanswered

A letter that does not come back still changes the one who sent it.

• Teplitz, July 1812

  Unsterbliche Geliebte

  In July 1812 Beethoven writes, in pencil, to a woman he calls immortal. The letter stays with him. Her name does not.

• 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.

• Seljuk-period Caucasus

  The Man Who Went to the Wilderness

  At Ganja, Nizami took an Arab legend and made a Persian wound: Qays named mad for Laylā, then named by the desert. The poem loves its grief. It does not have to be a model.

• 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.

• Occitania, late 12th century

  A chantar m'er

  A trobairitz writes that she must sing of what she would rather not. Hers is the only woman's song from that court whose melody still sits on the page.