To become ourselves we are these wayward things.

And the lies at noon, months' tremblings, who foresaw?

And I did not foresee fraud of the Law

The scarecrow restraining like a man, its rings

Blank . . . my love's eyes familiar as a scar!

The mutual involvement in the affair (and the sonnets) becomes more intense when the poet and the mistress ally against (hypothetically) skeptical readers:

They may suppose, because I would not cloy your ear--

If ever these songs by other ears are heard--

With "love" and "love," I loved you not, but blurred

Lust with strange images, warm, not quite sincere.

To switch a bedroom black. O mutineer

With me against these empty captains! gird

Your scorn again above all at this word

Pompous and vague on the stump of his career.

The poet, however, becomes the victim of his own exhortation: his rhetoric helps to clarify the futility of the affair. If he is successful, if he draws Lise finally into the experience of furtive and illicit love, he prevents the affair from ever becoming permanent. They cannot publicize their love: