What We Can Know

Despite Francis’s satisfaction with the poem, he remained committed to the idea that Vivien would possess the only copy of it in existence. He also accepted Harry’s withdrawal from the biography project.

After Harry died in 2016, his papers were archived, eventually ending up at the University of Ardnamurchan in Scotland, where they were spared from the Inundation. Because of the social unrest in the surrounding areas and the treacherous journey entailed, it is difficult for Thomas to examine the Kitchener archive himself. He nonetheless believes that it includes notes on “A Corona for Vivien.”

Mentioning the Lake District as part of the journey to Ardnamurchan turns Thomas sentimental about William Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage, which was submerged in the Derangement. He regrets his inability to visit places he has only read about but can vividly imagine. He describes his feeling as something more than nostalgia.

Thomas first encountered this feeling when he was still a young scholar. He read the book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), by Richard Holmes, which chronicled the author’s attempt to follow the foot journey taken by his literary idol, Robert Louis Stevenson, through southern France. At one point, Holmes narrated his conviction that he would meet his long-dead hero at the bridge to Langogne. Holmes turned bereft when he saw that the bridge had already collapsed. Thomas compares this incident to his own feeling, suggesting that he is like Holmes, waiting for the past to reach him. He feels that had he lived in an earlier time, he might have been intimately acquainted with the people he has been studying and enjoyed their way of life.

Thomas returns to the topic of the poem by tracing its life cycle from a literary piece to a significant cultural object. In December 2014, Harry wrote an email to Francis to continue his praise of the poem. Thomas speculates that Harry must have had either notes or a copy of the poem. The following month, Harry wrote about it in the Times Literary Supplement and introduced the comparison between Vivien’s birthday and the Immortal Dinner. Over a year later, a blog picked up Harry’s comparison, formally referring to the event as the Second Immortal Dinner for the first time. As public interest in the poem began, the Blundys refused to answer any inquiries about its publication.

Three years after the dinner, Harriet spoke to the press about her memories of the poem, though her recollections were affected by her predominant concerns about her children. In an essay she was commissioned to write, she described the poem as a vindication of love over death and destruction. This drove the demand for the poem’s publication.

Based on emails and journal entries, Thomas believes that Vivien held onto the poem, even if aspects of its composition disturbed her. She was reluctant to indulge Francis’s desire for praise but also indicated their life was generally peaceful after the dinner. In one journal entry, she wrote a paragraph ostensibly addressed to Francis, asking if the poem was meant to signal a turning point in their relationship. The paragraph also referenced her domestic role and Francis’s failure to share in her inner life.

Vivien traveled to London frequently. By December, she and Francis started sleeping in separate rooms. Francis continued to consult her about his poems, though she inexplicably refers to this consultation as a “seedge” (misspelling of “siege”). In early 2016, Harry died of a heart attack. Vivien and Jane grew closer. Francis was too upset to attend Harry’s memorial service, which angered Vivien. She spent the next two days with Jane, though there are no records of what they spoke about during this time.

A year later, Francis began to experience the pancreatic cancer that would cause his death. Harriet’s essay appeared, which enraged Francis. As public demand for the poem grew, Vivien expressed her objection to its publication. This caused a fight between Francis and Vivien, which ended with Francis ransacking her desk to look for the scroll. Soon, the illness and chemotherapy made it difficult for Francis to interact with any guests. Francis’s stated gratitude toward Vivien made her feel guilty, though she maintained her position that the poem would remain unpublished. Three months after his diagnosis, Francis died.

The popular rumor was that Francis was restricted from publishing the poem by an oil company that bought the piece’s intellectual rights. Though the rumor was dispelled by 2020, critics wondered why Vivien failed to defend Francis’s reputation. The rumor only served the poem’s reputation by insinuating that it was powerful enough to intimidate oil executives.

A year after Francis’s death, Vivien leased the Barn out to tenants. Shortly before she moved out, she and Peter buried her dog in the garden. She moved to Scotland to live with Jane, where she remained out of the public eye until her death in 2038.

Aside from Harriet, the only other guest willing to speak about the dinner was Mary. The novel she wrote in the wake of the dinner was poorly received, as readers and critics alike missed her previous style. To rehabilitate her reputation, she spoke to the press about her memory of the dinner. She described Francis’s poem as one concerned with climate change, though she refused to say that Francis denied the phenomenon.

At the start of summer 2120, Thomas and Rose go swimming at the beach. They are so overtaken by their shared passion that they make love in the shallows. Thomas feels his youth restored by the water that both destroyed the cities of the past and moved him and Rose to passion. Thomas is reluctant to express his love for Rose because of their history, but he is surprised when Rose says it instead. He reciprocates. Their words commit them to an implied shared future.

Thomas moves back into Rose’s apartment. They draw from their romantic passion to motivate their summer research projects. Rose works on a monograph describing fictional realism’s inadequacy in the years leading up to the Inundation. She suggests that Thomas should finally visit the Kitchener archive, though Thomas is reluctant to brave the treacherous journey. Instead, he resolves to write a historical essay about the reputation of “A Corona for Vivien.” His inability to write about the poem itself bothers him.

Rose criticizes Thomas’s nostalgia for the pre-Inundation era, believing that he would either hate it or suffer immensely if he lived with the era’s challenges. Thomas counters that the prevailing issue of their time is that there is no diversity of thought. Civilization’s collapse scared humanity away from new ideas, focusing instead on preventing any further destruction. At least people in Blundy’s time worked hard to produce new ideas and experiences, even if their endeavors failed and their civilization ultimately leaned toward self-destruction.

A week later, Thomas finishes the draft of his essay, but he still feels the need to pursue the topic of the poem’s existence. Rose urges him to give up his obsession, and Thomas concedes, though he secretly continues to harbor his convictions about the poem. He and Rose marry later that August.

Thomas publishes his paper, which collects his findings on “A Corona for Vivien” in the wake of the Second Immortal Dinner. He writes that from 2018 to 2025, the poem’s reputation was co-opted by environmental activists who believed that Blundy’s poem carried a climate-change message. Similarly, the notion of the “Blundy corona” transformed into an emblem for long love, and people who had been married for several decades referred to themselves as Blundy couples.

Thomas examines the decline of the climate-change movement, which he pins to the Derangement. He begins with the first climate war, between India and Pakistan in 2036, a struggle for increasingly scarce water that resulted in millions dead on both sides. Parallel conflicts were fought in Iran and Taiwan, exacerbating global tensions and bringing about the start of the Derangement. People stopped thinking of progress and change in favor of survival.

In 2042, the Inundation occurred when the Atlantic Ocean rose, causing hundreds of millions of deaths. Great Britain became an archipelago. Twenty years later, the world began to move on from the Inundation’s trauma, making resolutions toward decarbonization. During this time, interest in Francis’s corona was renewed, signaling a widespread romanticization of lost ecology. Contests were held to imagine or reconstruct the poem, though the original ultimately retained its power by never being fully known by the public—if Vivien’s copy had been found, the poem’s fame would have likely died out. Even then, Thomas posits, none of the renewed interest impacted the Third Sino-American War, which devastated many cities across the Pacific and underscored the cultural focus on survival over progress.