Karenina

It's easier to write about a love that seems

Impossible or difficult or somehow barred;

That occupies the distant orbit of one's dreams;

Whose realization is unlikely, or just hard.

A troubled love's complaint, although of course not new,

Is for that very reason often easier

To share with others who, perhaps, have suffered too.

Its treatment may be lighter, open, breezier,

Or wrought beyond belief into a twist of woe

But either way, the audience is primed to feel

Beside you, filtered through what they already know:

Which means that they'll believe that thwarted love is real.

But speak of love achieved, and Tolstoy's words reverse:

A happy love's unique, and so the poem's worse.