I do not know how I, who fell in love with France and the French and their language while still in high school, and then read The Spirit of Romance when I was 18 and was hugely influenced by it, could have gone this long before discovering Merwin’s 2002 book The Mays of Ventadorn. But so I did. It’s always a blessing and a pleasure (though the young perhaps cannot believe this—I couldn’t when that young) to discover something that you ought to have known about already and read.