Betrayal and Disappointment

Alas! they had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth; And constancy lives in realms above; And life is thorny; and youth is vain; And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain.

O Rose, thou art sick. The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.

The only art her guilt to cover, To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover, And wring his bosom, is—to die.

When lovely woman stoops to folly, 5 And finds too late that men betray, What charm can soothe her melancholy? What art can wash her guilt away?

Chaste to her husband, frank to all beside, A teeming mistress, but a barren bride.

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.

T’ abhor the makers, and their laws approve, Is to hate traitors and the treason love.

In friendship false, implacable in hate, Resolved to ruin or to rule the state.

Love-quarrels oft in pleasing concord end; Not wedlock-treachery.

Yet beauty, though injurious, hath strange power, After offense returning, to regain Love once possess’d.

The infernal serpent; he it was, whose guile, Stirr’d up with envy and revenge, deceiv’d The mother of mankind.

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden.

It was that fatal and perfidious bark, Built in th’ eclipse, and rigg’d with curses dark, That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.

Send home my long strayed eyes to me, Which (Oh) too long have dwelt on thee.

And swear No where Lives a woman true, and fair.

Though she were true, when you met her, And last, till you write your letter, Yet she Will be False, ere I come, to two, or three.

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies.

O! never say that I was false of heart, Though absence seem’d my flame to qualify.

I found you as a morsel, cold upon Dead Caesar’s trencher.

You shall see in him The triple pillar of the world transform’d Into a strumpet’s fool.

And be these juggling fiends no more believ’d, That palter with us in a double sense; That keep the word of promise to our ear And break it to our hope.

There’s no art To find the mind’s construction in the face: He was a gentleman on whom I built An absolute trust.

And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s In deepest consequence.