She does not want to dress herself gorgeously now as she has no lover. Among other great love wails by a woman are the old Saxon elegy "A Woman's Complaint" and the second Idyl of Theocritus.
All the pain of frustrated love is due to the repressing of the tender as well as of the physical emotions, to the damming up of the libido, which is love in its broadest sense.
Sometimes the poets tell us almost plainly their real loss, or suggest it in such a manner that we feel the thought has become conscious in the poem. Read in Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" the fifteen lines beginning, "Is it well to wish thee happy," and one can see that the victim is suffering because Amy is in another's embrace rather than in that of the singer's. He thinks with maddening thoughts of the clown she married.
"He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel forces,
Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse."
He calls sarcastically upon Amy to kiss her husband and take his hand. "He will answer to the purpose." The singer clearly shows his pain because he has been cheated out of physical pleasure.
When we come to the decadent poets, the loss is sung plainly. One of the most beautiful poems of this kind is Dowson's Cynara. The poem is frankly sexual. The poet, who was rejected by a restaurant keeper's daughter, tries to console himself with another woman for his loss. The words "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion" mean he loves her in others. He tries to satisfy himself partly by thinking he is with her while he is with another. It is a poem showing how a sexual repression seeks an outlet with some one who did not arouse it and how the poet forces himself to imagine that he is with the one who created it. The poem makes this clear, that a love poem is always a complaint that the libido is being dammed.
It is therefore true to say that even in the tenderest and sweetest love lyrics, like those of Burns and Shelley for instance, one sees the play of unconscious sexual forces. This fact does not make the poem any the less moral or the poet any the less pure.