The “Concaue Wombe”: Echo, Love and Death in A Louers Complaint

No-one dies in A Louers Complaint . But the poem finds death in the heart of love itself. This essay suggests it does so by stressing and strengthening the complaint’s traditional links between love, death, and echo… This essay traces, first, A Louers Complaint ’s innovative variations upon these generic themes via Catherine Bates’ argument (174-215) that the poem depicts desire as a repeated circulation of violent urges within and between women, and thus implies love has murderous and suicidal tendencies.