Hero and Leander and Other Poems

Marlowe's fragmentary masterpiece is the most tender and dangerous love poem in English before the Romantics. Written in ottava rima of staggering beauty, it tells the story of Hero, priestess of Venus on the Hellespont, and Leander, the youth who swims nightly across the strait to reach her. What begins as exquisite sensuality becomes a meditation on desire's impermanence: Marlowe knew even as he wrote that some things, however bright, are fated to drown. The poem pulses with the Renaissance conviction that beauty and death are somehow kin, that to love fully is to flirt with annihilation. Chapman completed it after Marlowe's mysterious death at 29, but the vital voice remains unmistakably Marlowe's: argumentative, audacious, sensuous, and haunted by what lies beneath pleasure. This is Elizabethan poetry at its most human, its most heartbreaking.