To Love Or Not To Love

To love, or not to love: that is the question:
What love is mine that I do not cherish
With every beat of my eager heart?
The boy knows not the heart of me. To live, to feel;
No more; and in feeling a person loses their inhibitions
But gains the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation
No man can escape. To live, to feel;
To feel: perchance to love: there’s the problem;
For, in living and feeling what love may come
When we for one instant let our hearts run free,
Must make us think: there’s the respect
That makes value of so long life;
For who would bear the yoke and horns of love,
The lover’s drama, the spouse’s worries,
The pangs of insecurity, the world’s challenges,
The separation that comes when lovers make
Their two lives one and yet continue to live as two,
When he himself might his vow make
With all his heart? who would emotions bear,
To keep with him, inside him, ever after,
But that the allurement of the sense of love,
The numinous place from which
No voyager has yet return untouched, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear that love we have
Than stifle the strongest sentiment man has known?
Thus this does make heroes of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is covered with a happy, rosy flush,
And enterprises of great vigor and moment
With this regard their hearts are fully pledged,
And live happily ever after. -- Soft you now!
The fair boy! Dear heart, in thy prayers
Be all my love remember’d.