Chapter CXVII

And with the morn, though sunrise shall disperse
Those phantoms that dark hours oft have sought,
The spectral visage of some midnight thought
Doth still unite its poison to my verse.
In truth, suspicion makes a cruel nurse,
A poor companion, that the world hath brought
To tend the soul when, ill and overwrought,
It reaches by such means a stage still worse.
Let not my life, then, kill this tree of love,
Nor canker-worm destroy its fresh green leaf,
Nor moth devour its foliage from above;
So that its ruin shatter my belief
In love’s ideal and Cupid’s vernal grove.
For love that doth prove false must die of grief.