Mainly I strive to show by deed and word
How great my love for you, how deep and strong;
Daily you hear my heart’s one passionate song,
And still pass on as though you had not heard;
Your slightest smile, your gentlest glance can gird
My suppliant life with joy that lingers long, –
You touch my hand, and straight a gladsome throng
Of hopes are born, and all my soul is stirred.

But ah, you do not understand nor see,
And when my looks of my devotion tell
You deem it but some pitiful wayward spell;
Love comes not my interpreter to be,
And in your eyes, because you love not me,
My greatest fault is loving you too well!

From Love in Earnest – Sonnets, Ballades and Lyrics by J.G.F. Nicholson (1892)

Ignacio Martínez Moreno, in Uranian Poetry: The Homosocial and Homoerotic Paradox (2020), describes John Gambril (Francis) Nicholson as “a prisoner of his feelings, only able to express them through poetry.” Hopeless Love reveals a form of homoeroticism in which the lightest touch can unleash a flood of feeling—emotions that need not be reciprocated to ignite passion within the poetic voice.

Oh yes, I know this all too well.

I perceive beauty where others see none. I feel a desire that no one else seems able to recognise. He is the pearl concealed within a hard exterior. Through close proximity, a sense of deep familiarity takes hold, awakening attraction and affection that override his less generous qualities.

It is an obsessive infatuation, one in which reciprocation will never arrive—because he refuses, or is simply unable, to see the effect he has on me.

And no matter how hard I try… it is not recognised.