Midway through Jane Austen's Persuasion, Anne Elliot and Captain Benwick, the retired first lieutenant of the Laconia, discuss the relative poetic merits of Walter Scott and Lord Byron. Benwick has been mourning the sudden death of his fiancee, and his decided taste for reading (90) has led him to Byron's poetry as best embodying the impassioned spirit of hopeless agony and those images of broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness with which he sympathizes in his grief (94). Anne understands Benwick's attraction to Byron ism, but cautions against his aggrieved overindulgence in the emotional intensity of Regency poetry in general, declaring that such work could be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely, and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly (94). For Anne, the aesthetics of loss so definitive of Romantic poetry risk leading the reader beset by actual loss to dangerous emotional extremes. Anne Elliot's caution may be seen as not so much a critique of Romantic emotionalism per se--as Sarah Wootton stresses, romantic language and feelings are not purged from [the] novel (30)--as a questioning of the efficacy of poetic excess in the aftermath of a traumatic or catastrophic loss. As Michelle Levy notes, Romantic poets may have generally embraced Edmund Burke's contention that literary texts are capable of grafting a on wretchedness, misery, and death itself (92; noted by Levy 548), but Austen's fictional conversation suggests that such melancholy pleasure is likely counter-productive for someone who is actively grieving; it suggests an outer limit to poetic emotional intensity, or at least the necessity to view affective productions in relation to the context in which they are read. Furthermore, in contextualizing the particular conversation between Benwick and Anne Elliot in terms of the effects of male Romantic poetry on male grief, Austen's scene both troubles the gendered conventions of what Anne Mellor has defined as masculine Romanticism, in which a typically male speaker often plumbs the depths of his affective subjectivity through a construction of grief, and posits the failure of such emotional gambits to address the psychological needs of grieving itself. For Mellor, the more paradigmatic figure here is not Byron but Wordsworth, whose poetry repeatedly records the development of a male subjectivity that is defined through the silencing of the female and the tendency to represent characters, such as Martha Ray in Thorn, Margaret in Ruined Cottage, or Female Vagrant as terminally bereft (19). Austen's Persuasion suggests that such representations of bereavement, insofar as they presume to speak for marginalized others, fail to address adequately the trauma of loss. In this context, Dorothy Wordsworth's prose narrative of the 1808 deaths of George and Sarah Green, which left eight children orphaned and at the mercy of Grasmere's communal charity, furnishes a productive counterpoint to masculine Romanticism. Never intended for publication and offering no aesthetic delight on wretchedness, misery, and death itself, the narrative not only tests the limits of sympathy, as Levy has engagingly discussed, but also, implicitly, the efficacy of the poetic nexus of emotional intensity, loss and male subjectivity Dorothy's brother William helped to define and popularize in the period--and that he embodied in his own poetic response to the Green tragedy, the Elegiac Stanzas, composed in the churchyard of Grasmere. The circumstances of the Green family tragedy and subsequent charity of the Grasmere community have been well mapped by Levy, bin a brief summary of events helps to contextualize my own discussion of trauma and narrative to follow. On Saturday, March 19, 1808, the Greens, subsistence-living cottagers in a remote stretch of Easedale--a narrow valley which De Quincey describes as within a chamber or chapel within a cathedral (128)--hiked over the steep fells behind their cottage to Langdale to attend an auction. …