The Stars in the Pool: A Prose Poem for Lovers

A prose poem of aching beauty from 1920, this is the story of Flame, son of a distant island's lord, and Princess Roseheart, the woman he loves but leaves behind. Drawn by a dream-woman he must find, Flame embarks on a quest through enchanted landscapes, facing trials that strip him bare and forge his soul. Meanwhile, Roseheart remains, her love neither fading nor static; she transforms through waiting, discovering depths of compassion and selfhood she never knew she possessed. The stars in the pool of the title shimmer as both literal landscape and metaphor: reflections of something unattainable that turn out, at last, to be closer than imagined. Wallace writes with the lush sensibility of early 20th-century romanticism, her prose flowing like water through a dream. This is not a story of love conquering all in some tidy triumph, but of love expanding to hold both the splendor of longing and the grounded reality of two people finding each other again. For readers who believe that love stories can be literature, that allegory can break the heart.