In the poem, the speaker sails over a part of the ocean, then walks a mile on the beach, then across three fields, before he reaches the farm house where, interestingly, he just hears a voice. Sounds like a pretty small reward for a ginormous amount of effort right? Maybe it seems like that to us, but we bet you can think of a time when you expended a lot of effort to do something you wanted to do really badly. (Maybe it involved a Black Friday sale… ) No doubt there were plenty of people who were shocked at the amount of effort you expended for what appeared to them to be a small reward. So maybe we're not so different from the speaker after all, even if we aren't having a forbidden love affair.