Love and Its Wreckage

Plato defines it. Sappho feels it. Browning and Donne sacralise it. Marvell and Keats want it now, before time runs out. Bronte and Austen show what it costs and what it's worth. Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Hardy destroy people with it. Chekhov finds it too late. Pasternak buries it in history. Marquez waits fifty years. Duras strips it to the bone. Bishop, Hughes, and Auden write what's left after it's gone.