In the space of two days I've honed six poem drafts nearly to completion. This feels stunning to me, not least because doing that work was not especially difficult. I saw what the drafts were and what needed to happen quickly and clearly--in stark contrast to the long poem I've been working on since May, which has undergone a series of massive changes and still feels gluey, as if another massive change is inevitable.

Meanwhile, I've been reading two novels that I often fall back on when my making brain is overcharged: Dorothy Sayers's Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon. They are mysteries, but the plot is not the attraction. What draws me is the love affair between Lord Peter and Harriet Vane. I first read these novels as a teenager, in the days when most any love-affair description was a lure. But I continue to find this particular relationship exciting and satisfying. It is an attraction of both mind and body, and that combination still draws me like a moth.

Neither character is very young. Neither is virginal. Both are fearsomely well educated. They easily quote Donne and Keats and Shakespeare from memory, and they tend to read tomes such as Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici while idling in river boats. Despite their intellect--because of their intellect--they are fired with physical desire for one another. There is no actual sex scene in these novels, but that hardly matters. Skin and breath and the set of a pair of shoulders become the erotic emblems of their twined thought. As Harriet pauses, in the moment before she accepts Peter's proposal of marriage, he gravely calls her magistra . . . mistress of arts, her title as a scholar. It is a tender, eloquent, and also steamy moment, though neither character has as yet embraced the other.

Sayers wanted to create romantic leads who were one another's equals, and in Gaudy Night, published in 1936, set in a women's college at Oxford, with a plot that explicitly centers around the "problem" of women's education and the rise of Hitlerian ideas about women's place in the polity (with a glance at eugenics and other contemporaneous horrors), this choice feels radical. Her earlier Lord Peter novels are more trivial--he is merely a titled ass-around-town who happens to love solving crimes. But in Gaudy Night and the follow-up Busman's Honeymoon, both the characters and the plots thicken into a larger consideration of what a marriage of equals might entail. Even as a young person I found this irresistible. And today, when I am immersed in making poems, I find myself turning to these novels as a rest and an encouragement.

Because to think is to feel. Of course it is. Of course.