"An Acrostic" by Edgar Allan Poe is a short poem that conceals a woman's name — Elizabeth — spelled out through the first letter of each line. The speaker addresses her with a mixture of longing and gentle defiance, arguing that her plea to "love not" is undone by the very sweetness with which she delivers it. Drawing on the myth of Endymion, whose cure for love cost him everything, the poem builds to a quietly devastating conclusion about the price of surrendering passion.

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