A poet's poem: beautifully crafted and perfect in form and sense: possibly the best American poem ever written. That is not only my opinion but also the the opinion of many other poets. You can find a fair critical analysis here, but there are many others.
http://www.csus.edu/org/litjrnl/dyckhofflove.html

It's about a woman trapped in a marriage to a husband who is less than perfect, as husbands often are. She's held captive by her unreciprocated love, a situation that's not at all uncommon. What traps her is not so much social conventions and her sense of duty, but how she feels. There is perhaps no more tragic condition than to be in a loving relationship somebody who is unworthy of our love.

The god referred to is, of course, Eros, god of love.

You should hear Robert Pinsky read this poem too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7qTiKbI_eQ




The painting is by Harold Knight - The Girl and the Picture

She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reason to refuse him.
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him.

Between a blurred sagacity
That once had power to sound him,
And Love, that will not let him be
The Judas that she found him,
Her pride assuages her almost
As if it were alone the cost--
He sees that he will not be lost,
And waits, and looks around him.

A sense of ocean and old trees
Envelops and allures him;
Tradition, touching all he sees,
Beguiles and reassures him.
And all her doubts of what he says
Are dimmed by what she knows of days,
Till even Prejudice delays
And fades, and she secures him.

The falling leaf inaugurates
The reign of her confusion;
The pounding wave reverberates
The dirge of her illusion.
And Home, where passion lived and died,
Becomes a place where she can hide,
While all the town and harbor side
Vibrate with her seclusion.

We tell you, tapping on our brows,
The story as it should be,
As if the story of a house
Were told, or ever could be.
We'll have no kindly veil between
Her visions and those we have seen--
As if we guessed what hers have been,
Or what they are or would be.

Meanwhile we do no harm, for they
That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given.
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea,
Where down the blind are driven. (less info)