New Delhi, May 20 -- Lord Byron did not write this line for a greeting card. He wrote it for a grieving man confessing his sins to a friar. The poem is dark. The love it describes has already ended in tragedy. And yet the line about love finding a way shines through the darkness like something undefeated. It is not a comfort. It is a fact. And facts, especially uncomfortable ones, tend to last.

The image Lord Byron chose is deliberate and precise. Wolves do not avoid a path because they are weak. They avoid it because the danger is too great even for them. Byron is saying that love goes where even predators will not. That is not sentiment. That is a statement about the nature of love as a force.

Love, in this reading, does not calculate...