To My Inconstant Mistress — Page 75
The solemn vengeance of this poem has a strange tone—not unique, for it had sounded somewhere in mediæval poetry in Italy—but in a dreadful sense divine. At the first reading, this sentence against inconstancy, spoken by one more than inconstant, moves something like indignation; nevertheless, it is menacingly and obscurely justified, on a ground as it were beyond the common region of tolerance and pardon.