Future Scholars, Lost Poem

In the year 2119, Tom, a literary scholar, journeys to the Bodleian Snowdonia Library, a remote mountain archive, to research the enigmatic "Second Immortal Dinner" and the vanished poem "A Corona for Vivien" by the celebrated poet Francis Blundy. Tom's world is shaped by environmental catastrophe and the collapse of old civilizations, yet the past's literary treasures remain obsessively studied. He is aided by archivist Drummond, who is fascinated by a cryptic number in Vivien Blundy's journals. Tom's research is haunted by the question of what can truly be known about the past, especially when so much is preserved, yet the most vital truths—like the fate of Blundy's lost poem—remain elusive. The search for the poem becomes a quest for meaning, love, and the limits of knowledge.

Vivien's Sacrifice and Regrets

Vivien Blundy, once a promising academic, has given up her career to support her husband Francis's poetic genius, living in rural isolation. Her journals reveal a woman who finds comfort in domesticity but is haunted by the memory of her first husband, Percy, who died after a long decline from Alzheimer's. Vivien's life is marked by small joys—gardening, cooking, reading—but also by a sense of loss and the gradual erosion of her own ambitions. She reflects on the choices that led her to serve another's genius, never quite sure if she is content or quietly resentful. The mundane details of her days are interspersed with flashes of honest pain, hinting at deeper disappointments and the cost of devotion.

The Second Immortal Dinner

On Vivien's fifty-fourth birthday in 2014, she prepares a lavish dinner for a circle of friends and family, echoing the legendary "Immortal Dinner" of 1817. The guests include writers, editors, scientists, and old friends, each bringing their own secrets and tensions. The centerpiece of the evening is to be Francis's reading of his new poem, a "corona" written as a gift for Vivien. The dinner is both a celebration and a performance, with Vivien orchestrating the domestic details while Francis prepares for his poetic triumph. The gathering is suffused with nostalgia, rivalry, and the unspoken burdens of love and aging, setting the stage for the poem's fateful debut.

Guests, Secrets, and Tensions

The dinner guests arrive carrying their own emotional baggage: Mary and Graham Sheldrake's marriage is unraveling amid mutual infidelities; the Gages struggle with new parenthood and the anxieties of the future; Jane and Harry Kitchener navigate sibling rivalry and professional jealousy. The conversation veers from climate change to personal betrayals, with Francis's contrarian views and self-importance grating on some. Underneath the surface, old wounds and desires simmer, and the dinner becomes a microcosm of generational change, shifting values, and the quiet desperation of those who feel left behind by time and circumstance.

The Corona's Creation

Francis Blundy's "A Corona for Vivien" is a technical marvel: fifteen interlinked sonnets, each last line repeating as the next's first, culminating in a final "crown" sonnet. Written on vellum, it is both a love letter and a monument to nature, memory, and mortality. Yet the poem is also a fiction—Francis, an indoor man, appropriates Vivien's love of the natural world and her past with Percy, weaving them into a narrative that is as much about his own need for greatness as about her. The poem's creation is an act of both devotion and theft, blurring the lines between art and life, truth and invention.

Dinner's Aftermath and Silences

After Francis reads the Corona, the room is filled with a complex silence—each guest lost in their own thoughts, some moved, others bewildered or distracted. Vivien receives the poem with gratitude but also unease, sensing that it distorts her reality and appropriates her memories. The guests drift away, their private dramas unresolved. The poem, intended as a gift, becomes a source of tension and ambiguity. In the days that follow, Francis seeks praise and reassurance, while Vivien withdraws, uncertain how to respond to a work that both honors and erases her.

The Poem's Disappearance

Despite its anticipated greatness, "A Corona for Vivien" is never published. Vivien, troubled by its implications and the secrets it encodes, hides or destroys the only copy. Rumors swirl: was the poem suppressed for personal reasons, or did Francis sell it to oil interests to silence its environmental message? The poem becomes a cultural obsession, a symbol of lost potential and the power of absence. Scholars, journalists, and activists project their own hopes and anxieties onto the vanished work, which grows in stature precisely because it cannot be read, becoming a mirror for the age's dreams and disappointments.

Love, Guilt, and Memory

The story of Vivien and Francis is entwined with guilt, loss, and the impossibility of clean endings. Vivien's care for Percy, her affair with Francis, and her later marriage are all marked by ambivalence and regret. The act of caring for a dying spouse becomes both a duty and a prison, and the transition to new love is shadowed by the memory of what was lost—and what was done to achieve freedom. The poem's narrative of love and nature is revealed as a cover for deeper wounds: the theft of experience, the erasure of the inconvenient, and the complicity of silence.

The Biographer's Dilemma

Tom, the future biographer, wrestles with the limits of historical knowledge. With an abundance of digital records, he can reconstruct the minutiae of the Blundys' lives, yet the most crucial truths—motives, feelings, the fate of the poem—remain out of reach. He debates with his colleague Rose about the ethics of invention: is it better to fill the gaps with plausible stories, or to remain silent where certainty is impossible? The act of biography becomes an uneasy dance between love and betrayal, fact and fiction, as Tom tries to honor his subjects without violating their privacy or distorting their lives.

The Search for Meaning

The vanished poem becomes a symbol of everything lost to time: not just art, but landscapes, species, and ways of life. Tom and Rose, living in a diminished future, are haunted by nostalgia for a world they never knew—a world of abundance, diversity, and possibility. Their own relationship is shaped by this longing, as they seek meaning in scholarship, love, and the pursuit of vanished beauty. The search for the Corona is also a search for connection, for something to bridge the gap between past and present, self and other, knowledge and love.

The Corona's Cultural Life

Even in its absence, the Corona exerts a powerful influence. It is invoked by climate activists, lovers, and artists as a talisman of hope, loss, and resistance. Its reputation grows with each retelling, each new layer of interpretation and rumor. Attempts to reconstruct or imitate the poem only reinforce its mystique; the imagined always outshines the actual. The Corona becomes a blank canvas for the anxieties and aspirations of a fractured world, a reminder that sometimes what is most powerful in art is what cannot be possessed or fully understood.

The Past's Irresistible Pull

Tom's obsession with the past is both a source of joy and a burden. He is drawn to the details of lost lives, the textures of vanished worlds, even as he recognizes the futility of trying to recover what is gone. The past exerts a gravitational pull, shaping identity and desire, but also threatening to trap the living in endless longing. The search for the Corona becomes a metaphor for the human condition: always reaching for what is just out of reach, always haunted by the knowledge that every gain is also a loss.

The Final Discovery

A breakthrough comes when Tom deciphers a coded map reference in Vivien's journal, leading him and Rose to the ruins of the Barn, now an island in a flooded landscape. After a grueling journey, they unearth a sealed container, hoping to find the lost poem. Instead, they discover a violin and a confession: Vivien's account of her life, her loves, and the true story behind the Corona's disappearance. The confession reveals the moral complexities and compromises that shaped the poem's fate, and the impossibility of separating art from the messy realities of human lives.

Confession and Consequence

Vivien's confession is a reckoning with guilt, love, and the limits of forgiveness. She recounts the events leading to Percy's death, her complicity in Francis's actions, and the ways in which art can both heal and wound. The Corona, she reveals, was destroyed—not out of malice, but as an act of self-preservation and a refusal to let a lie become her legacy. The confession is both an act of atonement and a final assertion of agency, reclaiming her story from those who would mythologize or appropriate it.

Endings, Legacies, and Hope

In the aftermath of discovery, Tom and Rose confront their own failures and hopes. Their relationship, tested by betrayal and disappointment, finds new strength in shared purpose and vulnerability. The confession, and the absence of the poem, become a source of liberation rather than despair: a reminder that meaning is made not by clinging to the past, but by living fully in the present and accepting the inevitability of loss. The story ends with a sense of hard-won peace, as the characters—past and present—find ways to honor what was lost and to cherish what remains.

Characters

Tom (Thomas Metcalfe)

Tom is a literary academic in the 22nd century, driven by a need to reconstruct the story of Francis and Vivien Blundy and the fate of the lost Corona. His relationship with the past is both passionate and melancholic; he is acutely aware of the limits of knowledge and the dangers of nostalgia. Tom's psychoanalytic complexity lies in his oscillation between detachment and longing, skepticism and hope. His relationship with Rose is marked by intellectual partnership, emotional vulnerability, and the strains of betrayal and reconciliation. Tom's journey is one of self-discovery, as he learns to accept uncertainty and to find meaning in the act of searching rather than in the certainty of answers.

Vivien Blundy

Vivien is the emotional heart of the narrative: a woman who sacrifices her career and independence to support two husbands—first Percy, then Francis. Her journals reveal a mind both sharp and self-doubting, capable of deep love and deep resentment. Vivien's psychoanalytic arc is shaped by guilt (over Percy's decline and death), ambivalence (toward Francis's genius and self-absorption), and a longing for agency. Her ultimate act—destroying the Corona and leaving a confession—reflects her refusal to be defined by others' narratives, reclaiming her own story in the face of myth and erasure.

Francis Blundy

Francis is a celebrated poet whose genius is both a gift and a curse to those around him. He is charismatic, entitled, and often oblivious to the needs of others, including Vivien. His creation of the Corona is an act of both love and appropriation, as he weaves Vivien's experiences and memories into his own artistic vision. Francis's psychological complexity lies in his need for validation, his capacity for self-deception, and his ultimate inability to reconcile art with life. His actions—especially regarding Percy—reveal the dark side of genius: the willingness to sacrifice others for the sake of greatness.

Percy Greene

Percy is Vivien's first husband, a violin maker whose decline from Alzheimer's is rendered with painful intimacy. He represents a lost world of kindness, competence, and shared joy in nature. Percy's illness and death are the catalyst for much of Vivien's guilt and for the moral crisis at the heart of the story. His presence lingers as a ghostly standard against which later loves and betrayals are measured. Percy's fate is a reminder of the fragility of happiness and the costs of devotion.

Rose Church

Rose is Tom's colleague, collaborator, and eventual wife. She is brilliant, skeptical, and emotionally guarded, often challenging Tom's romanticism and holding him accountable to the demands of truth. Their relationship is marked by mutual respect, intellectual sparring, and the difficulties of intimacy in a world shaped by loss. Rose's own journey involves confronting her own desires, betrayals, and the need for forgiveness. She serves as both a mirror and a corrective to Tom's obsessions, helping him to find balance between past and present.

Harry Kitchener

Harry is Francis's brother-in-law, editor, and sometime biographer. He is both a champion and a rival, torn between admiration and envy. Harry's relationships—with his wife Jane, with Vivien, and with Francis—are marked by infidelity, competition, and a longing for significance. His decision to abandon the biography reflects his recognition of the impossibility of capturing the truth of another's life. Harry's psychological arc is one of self-awareness and resignation, as he comes to terms with his own limitations and the costs of ambition.

Jane Kitchener

Jane is Francis's sister and Harry's wife, a potter whose own creative work is overshadowed by the men in her life. She is both supportive and resentful, longing for recognition and struggling with the burdens of family loyalty. Jane's friendship with Vivien becomes a source of solace and solidarity in later years, as they both reckon with the legacies of their marriages. Jane's psychological complexity lies in her capacity for forgiveness and her quiet assertion of self-worth.

Mary Sheldrake

Mary is a celebrated writer whose marriage to Graham is marked by mutual infidelity and a search for meaning. She is both analytical and emotionally volatile, prone to self-doubt and moments of self-loathing. Mary's response to the Corona and to her own creative work reflects the anxieties of a generation caught between tradition and change, authenticity and performance. Her psychological arc is one of restless striving, as she seeks to reinvent herself in the face of disappointment.

Graham Sheldrake

Graham is Mary's husband, a financial advisor whose life is defined by avoidance and a lack of direction. He is both attractive and emotionally opaque, struggling to find purpose in a world that no longer values his skills. Graham's infidelities and his inability to commit reflect a deeper malaise, a sense of being left behind by history. His psychological journey is one of resignation and quiet despair.

Chris and Harriet Gage

Chris and Harriet represent a new generation, less anchored by tradition and more adaptable to the uncertainties of the future. Chris is practical, unpretentious, and good with his hands; Harriet is intelligent, ambitious, and increasingly preoccupied by the climate crisis. Their struggles with parenthood, work, and meaning mirror the larger anxieties of their time. Harriet's later role as a journalist shapes the public narrative of the Corona, while Chris's groundedness offers a counterpoint to the self-absorption of the older generation.

Plot Devices

Framing Narrative and Metafiction

The novel is structured as a layered narrative: Tom's 22nd-century investigation frames the story of the Blundys, which is itself mediated through journals, letters, and confessions. This device foregrounds the limits of knowledge, the unreliability of memory, and the ethical dilemmas of biography. The interplay between fact and fiction, invention and documentation, is both a plot engine and a thematic core, inviting readers to question what can truly be known—and what must remain a mystery.

The Lost Work as MacGuffin

The disappearance of "A Corona for Vivien" is the central mystery, motivating characters across generations. Its absence becomes more powerful than its presence, allowing it to serve as a repository for collective longing, anxiety, and projection. The search for the poem is both literal (the physical quest for the manuscript) and metaphorical (the search for meaning, love, and redemption). The poem's mythic status is reinforced by rumors, conspiracy theories, and failed attempts at reconstruction, making it a symbol of the unattainable.

Intertextuality and Allusion

The novel is saturated with references to poetry, biography, and literary history—from the Immortal Dinner of 1817 to the works of T.S. Eliot, John Clare, and others. These allusions serve both as homage and as commentary, situating the characters' struggles within a larger tradition of artistic ambition, rivalry, and loss. The intertextual web deepens the emotional resonance and invites readers to reflect on the ways literature shapes and is shaped by life.

Foreshadowing and Retrospection

The narrative is rich in foreshadowing: early references to guilt, loss, and the fate of the poem prepare the reader for later revelations. The use of journals and confessions allows for retrospective reinterpretation, as characters revisit and revise their own stories. The gradual unveiling of secrets—Percy's death, Vivien's complicity, the poem's destruction—creates a sense of inevitability and moral complexity, challenging readers to reconsider their judgments.

The Unreliable Narrator

Multiple narrators—Tom, Vivien, Francis, and others—offer competing versions of events, colored by their own desires, fears, and limitations. The novel foregrounds the unreliability of memory and the ease with which stories are shaped to fit personal or cultural needs. This device underscores the central question: what can we truly know about others, or even ourselves?

Analysis

"What We Can Know" is a profound meditation on the limits of knowledge, the ethics of storytelling, and the enduring power of art and memory. Through its intricate structure and psychologically rich characters, the novel interrogates the ways in which we construct meaning from the fragments of the past, and the dangers of both nostalgia and certainty. The lost poem at its center becomes a symbol of all that is irretrievable—love, innocence, nature, and the possibility of redemption—while also serving as a mirror for the anxieties and hopes of successive generations. McEwan's work challenges readers to confront the ambiguities of truth and the costs of devotion, both personal and collective. Ultimately, the novel suggests that meaning is not found in the recovery of lost masterpieces or the resolution of mysteries, but in the ongoing, imperfect work of love, forgiveness, and the acceptance of loss. In a world marked by environmental and cultural decline, the act of searching—however incomplete—becomes an affirmation of what it means to be human.

Last updated: November 11, 2025