Perpetual Light

Love arrives like a wild fowler: a warning bell rings, torchlight flares, and two lovers draw close in the dark—not to flee, but to meet what they already know.

Written in the early twentieth century, this memorial collection moves from the intimacy of shared life toward the hush of absence. William Rose Benét addresses his beloved, Teresa Frances Thompson, in a voice at once ardent and self-doubting: he would lay before her all the rare beauty he sees, but his “paupered speech” keeps turning love into inadequate words. As memory gathers its own perfumes and shadows, the poems ask whether devotion can keep its light as love passes from presence into memory. What can language preserve when the heart has so much more to say?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.