How much the creation of one’s own heart
is the beloved! - it would explain love
at first sight, of one’s soul the counterpart,
its mirror-image, and there be the proof! –
and, indeed, the vanity that’s at once
the virtue, a vision of one’s own beauty
in the other revealed, and for the nonce
reciprocated, would appear as duty
in each to uphold, to sustain through life,
but an instant expanded at the time,
a dream fulfilled – ah, the threshold of strife,
even as one tires of sameness, the rhyme
hackneyed, love at first sight might start to wither,
but if it’s love at all, it will deliver.
