This intense, artful poem opens voyeuristically, with an unnamed narrator overhearing the complaints of a weeping maiden. She wanders alone beside a river, her hair intriguingly loose and her cheeks 'pale and pinèd', tearing up old love-letters and other mementos or 'favours' (32, 36). Within a few stanzas she is joined by a second listener: a 'reverend' man retired from the bluster of court and city, who invites her to pour out her sorrows so that he 'may her suffering ecstasy assuage' (69). The maiden takes up his invitation, describing her resistance and eventual surrender to a deceitful young courtier while the reverend man, narrator, and readers of the poem listen in. As her dramatic monologue unfolds, however, it takes a peculiar turn and she begins to ventriloquize her deceiver in a way that proves far from easing her feelings. Indeed, she conjures his seductions so powerfully that they ' ''Would yet again betray the fore-betrayed, / And new pervert a reconcilèd maid!'' ' (328-9). The seductions themselves turn out to be equally perverse. What tempted her then and what she relives 'now', in these final lines, is his detailed account of how he ensnared other women, with passionate performances he then turned on her. Like her, these other lovers fell so enchanted with him they ' ''dialogued for him what he would say, / Asked their own wills, and made their wills obey'' ' (132-3). Such passionate speech itself - conjuring powerful feelings in the self and others - turns out to be as much the subject of the poem as the maiden's confession.