merely a word

Am reading The Dante Club and I don’t know how much of that is fiction but there’s a part there that says that after his wife Fanny died, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow never wrote a single word about her. Instead, after her death, all he could write were lines of an Alfred Tennyson poem – “Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace.” If it were his own words Longfellow was writing, the temptation to write Fanny’s name would be too strong, and then she would be merely a word.



(would that ñ be merely a word, even after all the times I have written it.)