Is lust in action; and till action, lust
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Again, this is another example where I find that my thoughts were better expressed by someone more talented and more dead than me. In Sonnet 129, Shakespeare speaks of how lust drives us to pursue the desired thing beyond reason, and equally drives us to hate the thing once we have obtained it. I was trying to capture this same idea in the first half of my own poem The Rape of Tamar and the Half-life of Joy by retelling the biblical story of Amnon and his sister Tamar.
The character “Lust” from Fullmetal Alchemist