About This Book
A young nobleman becomes consumed by love for a woman during a prolonged siege; an intermediary engineers their meetings and a tender, eloquent courtship follows. The poem follows the unfolding psychology and rhetoric of desire, showing how persuasion, social circumstance, and the caprices of Fortune carry the lovers from hopeful intimacy to separation when she is sent away and later takes another partner. It meditates on fidelity and betrayal and on how language, chance, and public pressures shape both the rise and the undoing of love.