Classic Poem

WHEREIN HE HEARS BUT CANNOT HEED THE VOICE OF REASON

Love in one breath releases me and keeps me,
Encourages, accuses, freezes, burns me,
Now laughs, now leers, now summons, now he spurns me,
Now strides the stars, now in hell's horror steeps me;
Now up, now down, despoiled and spent he sweeps me,
Till from the path of true desire he turns me:
But this false joy only revulsion earns me,
Such tortured fruit my tortured spirit reaps me.
A gentle thought then indicates the course,
Not of such grief as drowns the desperate eye,
Driving it blindly to blot out remorse,
But such, as guided back by the loud cry
Of friends, seduced as by some darker force,
In its slow death and mine consents to die.