Folio I
Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus amori.
— Virgil, Eclogues X.69
A scholarly repository of the history of romantic love across cultures and centuries.
From the Latin amare, to love — a word whose roots reach into Indo-European antiquity, cousin to Sanskrit kāma and Greek himeros.
Folio II
Ancient Greek
"He seems to me equal to the gods, that man who sits opposite you and listens close to your sweet speaking and lovely laughing — oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings."
Fragment 31 (tr. Anne Carson)
Persian / Farsi
"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about."
Masnavi (tr. Coleman Barks)
Spanish
"I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees."
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (tr. W.S. Merwin)
Classical Chinese
"You ask me: why do I live among the green mountains? I smile and don't reply; my heart is at ease. Peach blossoms flow downstream, leaving no trace — and I have a world apart from that of mortals."
Answer to Questions While Dwelling in the Mountains (tr. adapted)
Classical Japanese
"To love someone who does not love you is like worshipping at the back of a shrine — you see only the plain wood, never the face."
The Tale of Genji (tr. Royall Tyler)
Early Modern English
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer's lease hath all too short a date."
Sonnet 18
The catalogue method — entries arranged without strict chronology — imitates the working desk of a medieval scribe, accumulating evidence without yet building argument.
Folio III
Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer's lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion dimmed; and every fair from fair sometime declines, by chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade, nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade, when in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
William Shakespeare — Sonnet 18 (1609)
Come, let us make love deathless, thou and I, seeing that our footing on the Earth is brief — a little while and we shall be away, and no man knows, when he goes out to war, what face shall greet him in the evening air. So let us make love deathless while we may.
Herbert Trench — Come, Let Us Make Love Deathless (1900)
Folio IV
"The Greeks had four distinct words for love — eros (erotic), storge (familial), philia (friendship), agape (divine). The impoverishment of modern languages to a single word is not merely lexical but philosophical."
"Ibn Hazm catalogued thirty-eight forms of love-sickness in his Tawq al-hamama (Ring of the Dove, 1022 CE) — the first systematic phenomenology of romantic love in any tradition."
"In Sanskrit, kāma names both desire and the god of love — his five flower-arrows wound the five senses. Vātsyāyana's Kāmasūtra (c. 400 CE) is not an erotic manual but a treatise on the good life in which love is one of three legitimate aims of existence."
"The Troubadour poets of 12th-century Occitania invented fin'amor — courtly love — as a deliberate inversion of feudal hierarchy: the knight subordinated himself to the domna (lady) as vassal to lord, creating a secular mysticism of desire that shaped all subsequent European lyric poetry."
"The Japanese concept of mono no aware — the pathos of things — is inseparable from love's impermanence. Cherry blossoms are beautiful precisely because they fall."
This repository was composed with the conviction that love — in its full scholarly and literary breadth — is among the most serious subjects available to human inquiry. The poets, philosophers, and scholars gathered here are not romantics in the pejorative sense; they are rigorous observers of the heart's most complex motion. We begin with the word itself: lovest, archaic second-person singular, as in Shakespeare's first line of address to the beloved — intimate, direct, still warm across four centuries.
lov.st — est. mmxxvi