From the first desperate cry, “Cease, cease,” you’re plunged into a lover’s turmoil. The speaker is begging Constantia to stop—her beauty and presence feel so overwhelming they threaten to unmake him. He says losing himself in her would be a madman’s lesson, a kind of death. Everything about her radiates an almost physical power: her dark eyes hold light, her touch leaps like fire, her breath and hair carry an intoxicating scent, and he is utterly undone by her nearness. Even as he writes, he weeps, and that line “the torn heart can bleed but not forget” strikes at the core of his pain. The mood is one of anguished rapture, a love that consumes and wounds. In the second stanza, he moves into a stranger, dreamlike awe—something wild, sweet, and impossible to explain. She breathes it out “in fast ascending numbers.” The whole fragment feels like a private glimpse of a soul caught between ecstasy and despair. It’s a poem of exquisite agony, where desire and despair are indistinguishable.
To Constantia: Stanzas 1 and 2 — Summary
As restored by Mr. C.D. Locock.
Cease, cease--for such wild lessons madmen learn Thus to be lost, and thus to sink and die Perchance were death indeed!--Constantia turn In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie Even though the sounds its voice that were Between lips are laid to sleep: Within thy breath, and on thy hair Like odour, it is yet And from thy touch like fire doth leap-- Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet-- Alas, that the torn heart can bleed but not forget.
breathless awe like the swift change Of dreams unseen but felt in youthful slumbers Wild sweet yet incommunicably strange Thou breathest now in fast ascending numbers...