"La Vie C'est La Vie" by Jessie Redmon Fauset made me appreciate how poetry, or writing in general, can build up an idyllic setting only to underscore, or contrast, it with sadness or horror or loneliness or fear or so many other emotions, and in doing so heighten the descriptions of both the setting/situation and the contrasted emotion/actions. I especially love the last two lines, as they speak to a kind of acceptance and reluctant resignation, and then counter that acceptance of life's follies with a wish, perhaps not completely serious, that life were over rather than to endure more of life's jests. This especially works well with the connection of love and pain earlier in the poem.
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/la-vie-cest-la-vie
La Vie C’est La Vie
On summer afternoons I sit
Quiescent by you in the park
And idly watch the sunbeams gild
And tint the ash-trees’ bark.
Or else I watch the squirrels frisk
And chaffer in the grassy lane;
And all the while I mark your voice
Breaking with love and pain.
I know a woman who would give
Her chance of heaven to take my place;
To see the love-light in your eyes,
The love-glow on your face!
And there’s a man whose lightest word
Can set my chilly blood afire;
Fulfillment of his least behest
Defines my life’s desire.
But he will none of me, nor I
Of you. Nor you of her. ‘Tis said
The world is full of jests like these.—
I wish that I were dead.
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