"Love is the history of a woman's life; it is an episode in man's. [Fr., L'amour est l'histoire de la vie des femmes; c'est un episode dans celle des hommes.]"

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In the Middle Ages, the troubadour poets invented the concept of courtly love--a fantasy love, a noble passion, which was also extra-marital and thus inevitably thwarted, illicit, adulterous. One of the medieval terms for it was amour honestus (honest love). I've always wondered why this passionate ideal--masochistic, spiritual-travelled with such wildfire throughout Europe. My poem, a ghazal, takes up the subject.

— Edward Hirsch