The speaker's name, Marius, was inspired by Walter Pater's novel, "Marius The Epicurean." The full title itself was inspired by Wallace Stevens' poem (in his collection, Opus Posthumous) "Red Loves Kit." That poem is part of a sequence of three; hence, in homage to the great poet, I have thus constructed my poem here. The setting was inspired by Pater's description, in that novel, of the house and estate of the Cecili, who were early Christians. The title of the poem came to me on a summer day, of 1993, as I stood in our front yard (I do not know why I remember the setting of that inspiration, but I do); but the poem was not begun, or completed, until the summer of 2000. Since October of 1975, I had wanted to write a love poem set in the early Christian period.
