My love, I have betrayed you seventy times

In this brief period since our hearts were met;

Against your ghost contrived unnumbered crimes,

And many times your image overset;

Forgot you, worshipped elsewhere, flung a flower

To meaner beauty, proved an infidel;

Showing my heart not loyal beyond an hour,

Forswearing Paradise, and invoking Hell.

Alas! What chains of thought can thinking bind?

It is in thought alone that I have faltered;

It is my faithless, vain, quicksilver mind,

By every chance and change too lightly altered.

Can we absolve, from this all-staining sin,

The angelic love who sits, ashamed, within?