In this chapter, attention turns to The White Doe of Rylstone, a poem arising out of familial grief whose engagement with the melancholic afterlife of war was brought into sharp relief following its publication in the year of Waterloo. Whether encountered in the love between the human and the non-human, in the slow effacement of Rylstone Hall, or in the merging of the sacred and the profane, the chapter argues that The White Doe offered a way for post-war readers to imagine peace as a form of aesthetic play that, even as it risks jettisoning actually existing peace to the realm of transcendental inaccessibility, discovers in the comingling of absence and presence, lack and plenitude, finitude and infinitude the preconditions for a life no longer marked by the struggle for self-definition.