In this lecture, Professor Selby will explore how poetic convention dictates expressions of grief and sorrow in love and war, while providing examples of poems in which literary rules fall away to render grief and loss in more acute forms. She will delineate the different hues of grief and loss in love that we encounter in the poems of Kuruntokai, an Old Tamil anthology of short poems from the early decades of the third century C.E., and loss of life in war found in the Puranānūru from the same time period. She will look at the poems set in four different female voices, those of the heroine (talaivi), her girlfriend (tōli), and the heroine’s biological mother (narrāy)as well as her foster mother of the heroine, who is also mother of the girlfriend (cevili-t-tāy). Professor Selby will examine the ways in which emotional ecologies shift and change across voices and contexts, and she will argue that in love contexts, it is the voice of the heroine, left alone in love, which gives the clearest and most direct expressions of grief, for it is in her voice that all poetic artifice falls away as she addresses her own heart or turns to her girlfriend in confidence. Selby will pay particular attention to the neytal landscape, that of the seashore, the most appropriate setting for iraṅkal, “lamentation.” For the war poems, the voice of the mother becomes especially acute as she expresses worry for her son as well as her pride for him in death.