Hero and Leander

Christopher Marlowe's luminous fragment tells the story of two young lovers separated by the most unforgiving stretch of water in the ancient world: the Hellespont. Hero, a priestess of Venus, guards her chastity in a tower on the shore of Sestos. Leander, a beautiful youth from the opposite bank in Abydos, sees her at a festival and is undone. What follows is one of literature's most searing explorations of desire meeting obstacle: they exchange glances, then words, then themselves, meeting in secret as Leander swims the treacherous strait each night to reach her. Marlowe's verse burns with physical longing and lyrical precision, building toward a climax of almost unbearable tenderness before the storm that drowns the young man and drives Hero to her own fatal embrace of the sea. George Chapman completed the poem after Marlowe's mysterious death, but the masterpiece lives in Marlowe's fraction. Who ever loved that loved not at first sight? Five centuries later, we still have no answer.