Thomas Heywood occupies a curious position in the landscape of English Renaissance letters: prolific almost beyond reckoning, credited by his own boast with having had "an entire hand, or at the least a main finger" in some two hundred and twenty plays, yet remembered today chiefly for a handful of domestic tragedies and a scattering of lyrics that survive, often anonymously, in the miscellanies and songbooks of his age. "She that denies me" belongs to this latter, more intimate body of work, and it exemplifies a mode of amorous verse that flourished in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean decades—verse steeped in the paradoxes of Petrarchan desire, inflected by classical mythology, and delivered with the wry, worldly knowingness that separates the professional playwright's lyric from the more earnest sonneteering of courtly amateurs. To read this poem well is to recognise that it belongs less to the tradition of soulful devotion associated with Sidney or the early Spenser, and more to a cooler, more cynical strain of love poetry that treats desire itself as an object of psychological scrutiny, even of comedy.

The poem opens with a formulation that immediately signals its argumentative, almost syllogistic temperament: "She that denies me, I would have; / Who craves me, I despise." This is not the language of a lover overwhelmed by feeling but of a mind coolly diagnosing its own perversity. The speaker presents himself as a case study in contrariness, a man whose desire is structured entirely by resistance. Such a stance draws on a long tradition, stretching back through medieval courtly love poetry to Ovid's Amores, in which the beloved's coyness is not an obstacle to passion but its very engine. Ovid himself had observed that what is granted freely loses its savour, and had counselled the lover to court difficulty rather than ease; Heywood's speaker internalises this Ovidian wisdom not as a strategic pose to be adopted for seduction's sake, but as an admission of psychological fact. He does not merely find resistance useful; he finds it necessary. Compliance itself becomes distasteful to him, an object of despite rather than desire.

This opening paradox is swiftly reinforced by an appeal to classical divinity: "Venus hath power to rule mine heart, / But not to please mine eyes." Here the poem invokes the goddess of love not as a figure of straightforward erotic fulfilment but as an ambivalent sovereign whose dominion is partial and compromised. The heart, the seat of passion, belongs to her; but the eyes—instruments of judgement, of discrimination, of aesthetic and moral appraisal—resist her governance. This division between heart and eye maps onto a broader Renaissance preoccupation with the fractured self, the notion, inherited from both classical philosophy and Christian theology, that the human person is a battleground of competing faculties: reason against appetite, will against desire, judgement against sensation. Heywood's speaker is not simply torn between loving and not loving; he is torn between the compulsion of passion and the fastidiousness of taste, and it is this second, less commonly dramatised tension that gives the poem its peculiar psychological interest. Venus can compel feeling, but she cannot compel approval, and the gap between the two is where the poem's wit resides.

The second quatrain develops this logic of contrariety with an almost mathematical precision: "Temptations offered, I still scorn; / Denied, I cling them still. / I'll neither glut mine appetite, / Nor seek to starve my will." The imagery here is appetitive, even gastronomic, and this is no accident. Renaissance love poetry frequently borrowed the vocabulary of feasting and hunger to describe desire, and Heywood exploits this convention to articulate a philosophy of moderation that is at once ethical and erotic. To "glut" the appetite is to satiate it entirely, to consume until desire collapses into surfeit and disgust; to "starve" the will is to deny it altogether, allowing longing to wither through neglect. The speaker positions himself between these two extremes, seeking neither the exhausted satisfaction of the libertine nor the frustrated emptiness of the ascetic. This is, in effect, a lyric restatement of the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean, transplanted from the register of moral philosophy into the register of erotic play. Such a transplantation was not unusual in the period; the language of ethics and the language of love shared a vocabulary throughout the Renaissance, and poets frequently borrowed the terminology of virtue and vice to describe the psychology of courtship. What is distinctive in Heywood's handling is the lightness of touch, the sense that this careful balancing act is undertaken not with the gravity of a moral treatise but with the self-aware amusement of a man who knows his own appetites rather too well.

The third stanza introduces the poem's most sophisticated mythological conceit, setting Diana against Venus in a comparison that crystallises the speaker's aesthetic and erotic philosophy: "Diana, double clothed, offends; / So Venus, naked quite: / The last begets a surfeit, and / The other no delight." Diana, goddess of chastity and the hunt, is imagined here as excessively covered, swathed in a modesty so complete that it becomes itself a kind of offence, a withholding that produces not virtue but tedium. Venus, by contrast, is imagined in total nakedness, an unveiling so absolute that it collapses mystery into mere availability, producing not pleasure but surfeit—the same satiety, the same exhaustion of appetite, that the speaker earlier warned against. This is an elegant structural inversion: the poem has already told us that denial provokes desire and that fulfilment provokes distaste, and now it dresses this psychological law in mythological costume, allowing two of the most resonant goddesses of the classical pantheon to embody its two failed extremes. Neither goddess, in her purest form, can satisfy the speaker, because each represents an absolute—total concealment or total exposure—and the poem's argument throughout has been that desire thrives not in absolutes but in the charged, unstable middle ground between them.

This mythological pairing also reflects a genuinely Renaissance habit of mind, one visible across the visual arts as much as in poetry. Painters and poets of the period were fascinated by the iconographic contrast between the clothed, armed, self-possessed Diana and the naked, vulnerable, alluring Venus, and they frequently staged this contrast to explore competing models of femininity: the virgin huntress who rejects male desire altogether, and the goddess of love who seems to invite it without reserve. Heywood's innovation is to refuse both models as objects of satisfaction, using them instead as diagnostic extremes against which to measure the ideal, elusive middle term that the poem's final stanza will name.

That final stanza delivers the poem's resolution, and it is here that the lyric's argument achieves its full, epigrammatic clarity: "That crafty girl shall please me best / That no, for yea, can say, / And every wanton willing kiss / Can season with a nay." The woman who will satisfy this restless, contrary speaker is neither the chaste refuser nor the willing giver, but the "crafty girl" who can perform refusal even while granting fulfilment—who can say no when she means yes, who can flavour, or "season," her most willing kisses with a plausible show of reluctance. This is a striking and, to modern sensibilities, uncomfortable resolution, for it asks the beloved not simply to be desired but to perform a kind of erotic theatre on the speaker's behalf, manufacturing the resistance that his own psychology requires in order to sustain desire. The culinary metaphor of "seasoning" is worth pausing over: it suggests that raw compliance, like raw food, is insufficiently palatable, and that desire requires the piquant addition of apparent denial to become truly appetising. The speaker does not want less pleasure; he wants pleasure complicated, textured, rendered interesting by an admixture of resistance that need not be sincere so long as it is convincingly performed.

It would be a mistake to read this final stanza simply as cynicism, though cynicism is certainly present in it. It is better understood as an unusually candid piece of psychological self-portraiture, one that anticipates by several centuries the kind of frank exploration of desire's perversity that later writers—Stendhal on crystallisation, or the more knowing psychologists of Restoration comedy—would pursue at greater length. Heywood's speaker is not proposing a general theory of how women ought to behave; he is confessing, with a certain rueful self-awareness, how his own desire is structured, and inviting the reader to recognise something of this contrariness in the wider experience of romantic longing. The poem's title, naming the woman who "denies," already signals that this is a portrait of a particular psychological type—the pursuer who is aroused by resistance—rather than a straightforward celebration of coy femininity as an ideal.

Heywood's professional life as a dramatist illuminates this lyric's dramatic, almost theatrical sensibility. As the author of A Woman Killed with Kindness, one of the most psychologically nuanced domestic tragedies of the period, Heywood demonstrated a sustained interest in the interior lives of men and women caught between duty and desire, virtue and transgression. That same interest in psychological nuance animates this shorter lyric, which functions almost as a dramatic monologue in miniature: a single speaking voice working through the logic of its own contradictory impulses, arriving by the poem's close at a resolution that is less a solution than a stable accommodation with paradox. The playwright's ear for the rhythms of persuasive speech—for the way an argument builds clause by clause towards its rhetorical point—is evident throughout, particularly in the poem's fondness for antithesis: denies/have, craves/despise, glut/starve, clothed/naked, no/yea, wanton/nay. This relentless patterning of opposites is not merely ornamental; it enacts, at the level of syntax, the very oscillation between extremes that the poem describes as the essence of desire itself.

The lyric also participates in a broader Renaissance fascination with paradox as a mode of thought, one that finds expression across disciplines from theology to natural philosophy. The period's writers delighted in formal paradoxes—praises of folly, defences of nothing, arguments that inversion reveals truth more effectively than straightforward assertion—and Heywood's poem, though slighter than the great paradoxical essays of the age, shares their intellectual temper. Its argument depends throughout on the deliberate inversion of expected values: denial becomes more desirable than acceptance, clothing becomes more offensive than nakedness, and a lie of refusal becomes more pleasing than an honest yes. This is love poetry conducted in the mode of wit rather than the mode of sincerity, and it rewards a reader attentive to the pleasures of intellectual play as much as to the pleasures of feeling.

Placed within the wider context of English love lyric, "She that denies me" sits comfortably alongside the more cavalier, worldly productions of poets such as Thomas Campion or the early Ben Jonson, writers who set songs to music and who cultivated a tone of urbane, slightly amused sophistication rather than the anguished sincerity associated with the sonnet tradition. Indeed, the poem's compact stanzas, its songlike cadences, and its aphoristic clarity suggest it may well have been composed with musical setting in mind, as much of the period's shorter lyric verse was intended for performance in domestic or theatrical settings rather than silent reading. This performative dimension matters: a poem meant to be sung, often by a boy actor in a play or a professional singer in a private household, carries its ironies lightly, inviting an audience to smile in recognition rather than to weep in sympathy.

What ultimately gives this small poem its enduring interest is the precision and honesty with which it maps a psychological pattern that remains recognisable across the centuries: the way desire can attach itself not to a person as such but to the dynamic of pursuit and resistance that the person makes possible. Heywood does not moralise about this pattern, nor does he entirely celebrate it; he simply describes it, with the detached clarity of a man amused by his own inconsistency and unwilling to pretend that love operates according to the simple logic of straightforward affection. In an age when so much love poetry aspired to the condition of religious devotion, elevating the beloved into an object of near-sacred worship, Heywood's lyric offers a bracing corrective: a reminder that desire is often less about the beloved's intrinsic qualities than about the peculiar and sometimes self-defeating architecture of the desiring mind itself. It is this psychological candour, delivered with such economy and wit, that allows a poem so modest in scale to repay the sustained attention of readers still puzzling over the perversities of the human heart.

George Crabbe’s “Meeting” is a compact lyric of reunion, but its emotional and philosophical scope is remarkably large. It begins in the language of romantic remembrance—“My Damon was the first to wake / The gentle flame that cannot die”—and ends with an imperative of radical emotional selection: “let naught in memory live / But that we meet, and that we love.” Between those poles, the poem moves through a difficult territory of separation, blame, mortality, moral error, and forgiveness. The meeting announced by the title is therefore more than a simple encounter between lovers. It is a meeting of past and present, ideal feeling and disappointed experience, judgment and mercy. Crabbe dramatizes the labor required to make reunion possible. Love here is not merely a spontaneous passion, nor is it a naive denial of injury. It is an active discipline of memory, an ethic of compassionate interpretation, and a choice to value renewed intimacy above the injuries that threaten to define a shared history.

The poem’s apparent simplicity is one of its great strengths. Crabbe employs the familiar vocabulary of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century love lyric: the “gentle flame,” the “faithful bosom,” the “softest sigh,” the “tender look.” Such language might initially seem conventional, but Crabbe places it under pressure. The poem does not linger in an untroubled pastoral world, despite the classically inflected name “Damon.” Instead, it introduces a “dangerous path” and a “bewildering world,” phrases that broaden private distress into a condition of human existence. The lovers’ conflict, whatever its particulars may be, belongs to a world in which error is hard to avoid and certainty is difficult to sustain. The lyric thus gains gravity not through narrative detail but through restraint. We are never told exactly what has separated the speakers, who has committed which fault, or what circumstances have made reunion necessary. This withholding makes the poem more universal. It leaves room for readers to recognize the innumerable forms that estrangement can take: misunderstanding, absence, mutual impatience, social pressure, betrayal, grief, or simply the gradual injuries of time.

Crabbe’s historical position illuminates the poem’s peculiar balance of tenderness and severity. Writing during a period associated with both the late Enlightenment and Romanticism, Crabbe was celebrated for poetry that refused to prettify human life. His major works often examine provincial society, poverty, disappointed ambition, domestic misery, and the moral compromises concealed by idealizing literary conventions. He is frequently contrasted with poets who found in nature or imagination an escape from social reality. Yet “Meeting” demonstrates that Crabbe’s realism does not make him emotionally cold. On the contrary, his understanding of human frailty permits a more durable conception of affection. Because he knows that people fail one another, he can imagine forgiveness as something meaningful rather than decorative. The poem’s love is moving precisely because it is not insulated from the ordinary hazards of living.

The name “Damon” introduces an important literary and cultural resonance. In classical and pastoral traditions, Damon is a conventional name for a shepherd-lover, a figure of song, longing, and idealized attachment. The name also recalls the ancient tale of Damon and Pythias, widely known as an emblem of extraordinary fidelity between friends. Crabbe’s use of “Damon” therefore places the beloved within a long poetic inheritance of devotion. But the poem does not remain wholly within that inheritance. “My Damon” is at once a stylized pastoral beloved and a deeply personal presence. The possessive pronoun matters. It gives the speaker’s voice intimacy and insistence, while the repeated declaration—“My Damon was” and “My Damon is”—creates a movement from remembered origin to present possession. The beloved is not merely a literary type. He becomes the person who awakened love and who remains capable of receiving its final, most inward expression.

The opening image of a flame belongs to an ancient metaphorical tradition in which love is figured as fire: illuminating, warming, consuming, and potentially painful. Crabbe carefully qualifies this fire as “gentle,” a word that tempers intensity with tenderness. The flame is not a violent blaze; it is a sustaining inward warmth. Yet it is also said to be a flame “that cannot die,” and the phrase introduces a note of absoluteness. The speaker represents first love not as a transient excitement but as an irreversible awakening. To be awakened by love is to enter a new condition of being. The word “wake” suggests emergence from sleep, unconsciousness, or emotional dormancy. Damon has not simply inspired an affection; he has activated a capacity already latent in the speaker. Love thereby appears as a form of knowledge, an awakening into a fuller emotional life.

The corresponding phrase, “My Damon is the last to take / The faithful bosom’s softest sigh,” brings death quietly into the poem. If Damon was “the first” to awaken love, he is also imagined as “the last” recipient of the speaker’s tender breath. The language of the “last” and the “sigh” may suggest a final exhalation, making the declaration a pledge that survives until death. This is a powerful movement from beginning to ending: the beloved holds the first moment of emotional animation and the final moment of surrender. The poem compresses an entire life of feeling into these two claims. Such compression explains the startling assertion that follows: “The life between is nothing worth.” Taken literally, the statement is excessive, even troubling. It seems to dismiss all the years, events, joys, and griefs that lie between love’s origin and its renewal. But its hyperbole reveals the intensity of the reunion. In the emotional present of meeting, the speaker feels that the intervening history has lost its power to rival the significance of love’s beginning and return.

That dismissal of “the life between” is not simply sentimental amnesia. The poem is acutely aware that memory can become an obstacle to intimacy. “O cast it from thy thought away!” the speaker urges, shifting into direct address. The imperative is dramatic: it asks the beloved to participate in an act of forgetting. Yet this is not an indiscriminate command to erase the past. The next lines specify what should be remembered: “Think of the day that gave it birth, / And this its sweet returning day.” Memory must be curated. The lovers are asked to preserve two occasions—the day of love’s first awakening and the day of its restoration—while refusing to allow the painful middle to dominate their consciousness. The poem thus recognizes memory as ethically ambiguous. Memory can honor affection, but it can also imprison people within grievance. Its value depends on what it chooses to make permanent.

Such an argument has a broader cultural resonance in a period deeply interested in sensibility, sympathy, domestic feeling, and the moral education of the emotions. The literature of Crabbe’s era frequently treated feeling as a source of ethical insight, though it could also be viewed with suspicion when it became self-indulgent or theatrical. “Meeting” occupies a subtle position within this tradition. Its speaker is undeniably passionate, yet the poem does not celebrate feeling merely because it is intense. The central emotional achievement is not the expression of pain but the refusal to make pain sovereign. Reunion depends on emotional maturity: the ability to recognize injury without endlessly displaying it, to distinguish a fault from an entire person, and to allow sympathy to revise judgment. In this sense, Crabbe’s lyric may be read as a miniature domestic ethics. It asks what kind of emotional practice allows attachment to endure in an imperfect world.

The third movement of the poem gives this ethic its strongest formulation: “Buried be all that has been done, / Or say that naught is done amiss.” These alternatives are deliberately provocative. The first asks that actions be buried, as though the past were a corpse requiring funeral rites. The second asks that no action be called wrong. Neither option is entirely uncomplicated. To bury all that has happened may seem like suppression, while to say that nothing has been done amiss may sound like denial. Crabbe’s phrasing, however, should not be confused with a shallow claim that wrongs do not matter. The poem immediately acknowledges that faults exist; indeed, its whole logic assumes them. Rather, it asks whether the lovers can stop treating fault as the final truth of their relationship. The difference is crucial. Forgiveness does not necessarily mean that an injury was unreal. It means that injury will no longer be granted absolute authority over the future.

The question “For who the dangerous path can shun / In such bewildering world as this?” provides the poem’s most explicitly philosophical moment. Life is imagined as a path, a metaphor with religious, moral, and literary depth. Human beings travel through a world that is not clear, stable, or easily navigated. “Dangerous” suggests temptation, accident, misjudgment, and vulnerability; “bewildering” implies that people are often lost before they are malicious. The question is rhetorical because its answer is obvious: no one can entirely avoid danger or error. With remarkable economy, Crabbe moves from the specific case of estranged lovers to a humane anthropology. People do wrong, but they do so in a world of confusion. This is not an excuse for cruelty. It is, rather, a plea for proportion in judgment. The poem urges us to understand human fault within the conditions of limited knowledge, pressured circumstance, and emotional uncertainty.

Crabbe’s treatment of fault is especially notable because it resists two opposite errors. On one side lies moral harshness, the tendency to identify a person wholly with an offense and to preserve indignation indefinitely. On the other lies sentimental idealization, which pretends that love can exist only where no failure has occurred. “Meeting” rejects both positions. Its vision of love depends neither on condemnation nor on illusion. Love “can every fault forgive, / Or with a tender look reprove.” The conjunction “or” is essential. Love may forgive, but it may also reprove. The poem does not make tenderness passive. A “tender look” can communicate moral disapproval without humiliation; it can call another person back to better conduct without destroying the bond between them. This is a remarkably sophisticated account of intimacy. The truest affection is not blind permissiveness but a form of correction shaped by care.

The image of the “tender look” is one of the poem’s most beautiful achievements. After the abstract language of fault, forgiveness, and reproof, Crabbe returns to the human face. A look is brief, silent, and intimate. It can express disappointment, warning, grief, understanding, and affection simultaneously. Unlike public accusation, it belongs to the private language developed between people who know one another deeply. The phrase therefore gives emotional texture to the poem’s moral claim. Reproof need not be cruel; it can be gentle because it arises from connection rather than contempt. The beloved is not put on trial before an impersonal code. Instead, he is addressed by a gaze that remembers his worth even while recognizing his error. In this respect, Crabbe anticipates later psychological understandings of relational repair: people are more likely to change when correction does not erase their dignity.

The poem’s commands—“cast,” “Think,” “Buried be,” “say,” “let”—create an atmosphere of urgency. This is not a quiet meditation conducted at a distance. It is speech intended to do something in the present moment. The speaker seeks to create the conditions of reconciliation through language itself. The repeated imperatives enact the difficult work of turning away from destructive remembrance and toward a renewed bond. At the same time, their force reveals anxiety. If love’s restoration were effortless, there would be no need to command memory so insistently. The poem’s tenderness is therefore edged with vulnerability. The speaker knows that the past can return, that resentments can survive even a joyful meeting, and that a reunion may fail if either lover insists on preserving every wound. The lyric’s emotional power arises from this tension between hope and the awareness of how fragile hope can be.

There is also a subtle interplay between private experience and ritual in the poem. The “day that gave it birth” and “this its sweet returning day” are treated almost as anniversaries or sacred observances. Love has its origin day and its day of rebirth. The language of “birth” invests the relationship with organic life: affection is something brought into being, something that may appear lost and yet return. The meeting becomes a kind of resurrection, though the poem avoids overt religious declaration. This underlying pattern of death and renewal is reinforced by the command that what has been done be “buried.” Something must be laid to rest so that love may live again. The poem thereby frames reconciliation as a temporal threshold. The lovers stand at a point where the old relation can either remain entombed beneath its injuries or emerge into a renewed form.

Crabbe’s lyric can profitably be compared with more idealizing traditions of love poetry. In much pastoral verse, lovers inhabit a simplified natural world in which emotional obstacles are stylized and readily overcome. In some Romantic poetry, love becomes a pathway to transcendence, a force that seems to lift the self beyond social and material constraints. “Meeting” retains the elevated diction and ardent concentration of these traditions, but it modifies them through an unmistakably Crabbean realism. The world is “bewildering,” not harmonious; the path is “dangerous,” not serenely pastoral; and love is valuable not because it escapes fault but because it can encounter fault without surrendering to it. Crabbe’s poem may therefore be called anti-pastoral in spirit even while it borrows pastoral names and conventions. It takes a literary emblem of ideal love and places it amid the moral complexity of lived experience.

The poem also bears comparison with the tradition of reconciliation in religious and ethical thought. Its language of forgiveness, burial, reproof, and renewal recalls the moral vocabulary of Christian teaching, even though the scene remains resolutely human and secular in its focus. Forgiveness is presented neither as a grand public spectacle nor as a one-sided act of saintly endurance. It is mutual in implication: “who the dangerous path can shun?” The question levels the lovers before the fact of universal imperfection. This humility is central to the poem’s ethical vision. A person who remembers his or her own susceptibility to error may judge another more mercifully. The speaker’s plea is consequently not only romantic but philosophical. It rests on the idea that finitude should produce compassion. Because all people move through a confusing world, no one should be reduced forever to a single wrong turn.

At the level of sound and syntax, Crabbe creates a graceful tension between certainty and uncertainty. The opening declarations are emphatic: Damon “was the first” and “is the last.” The later questions and alternatives—“Or say,” “For who”—introduce hesitation, possibility, and debate. Finally, the poem resolves into a lucid concluding wish: “that we meet, and that we love.” The repeated “that” gives these actions equal dignity. To meet is not merely to occupy the same place; it is to become emotionally present to one another. To love is not merely to feel desire; it is to sustain recognition after history has complicated feeling. The conclusion is thus deceptively simple. It distills the poem’s entire moral argument into two verbs. Meeting without love would be an encounter still shadowed by estrangement; love without meeting would remain a private memory or an unrealized aspiration. The poem seeks both embodied reunion and renewed affection.

The emotional effect of “Meeting” depends upon its refusal to indulge either despair or easy consolation. Readers may feel the sweetness of the lovers’ reunion, but that sweetness is sharpened by the sense of all that has had to be overcome. The phrase “sweet returning day” does not erase the “dangerous path”; it shines against it. Similarly, the final appeal to love does not negate fault but places it within a larger framework of tenderness. This mixture of joy and vulnerability gives the poem lasting resonance. Many poems praise the first blaze of passion, but Crabbe is interested in the more difficult beauty of return: the moment when people who have known disappointment decide not to let disappointment have the final word.

In this respect, “Meeting” offers a vision of love that remains compellingly modern. Contemporary readers may resist the poem’s sweeping invitation to forget, particularly when wrongdoing is serious or unequal. That resistance is valuable, for it allows us to see the poem’s ethical challenge with greater precision. Crabbe is not providing a universal rule that all harm should be overlooked. Rather, he dramatizes a particular emotional aspiration: where love remains possible, and where faults belong to the shared confusion of human life rather than to unforgivable violation, reconciliation may require a conscious loosening of the past’s hold. The lyric asks readers to consider whether they can remember mercy as vividly as they remember pain. Its answer is neither simplistic nor complacent. It insists that love’s greatness lies in its capacity to see imperfection clearly and still choose connection.

“Meeting” is ultimately a poem of emotional reorientation. It turns the gaze away from accusation and toward renewal, away from the isolating record of injury and toward the living presence of another person. Its language moves from flame to sigh, from burial to return, from dangerous wandering to the tenderness of a look. These images trace a profound journey: love awakens, suffers the claims of time and fault, and then seeks to become newly alive through forgiveness. Crabbe’s achievement is to make this journey feel both intimate and universal. His lovers are singular in their devotion, yet their predicament belongs to anyone who has tried to preserve affection in a world where no one moves without stumbling. The poem’s final emphasis on meeting and loving remains wonderfully resonant because it captures a truth poetry expresses with special force: the deepest bonds are not those untouched by difficulty, but those that discover, amid difficulty, a reason to return.