Thou art to me a delicious torment.

The phrase frames desire as a paradox: the beloved (or the object of longing) is simultaneously pleasurable (“delicious”) and painful (“torment”). In Emerson’s idiom, such a formulation can point beyond romantic anguish to a broader Transcendentalist sense that what most attracts us also unsettles us—because it exposes our incompleteness, our dependence, or our distance from an ideal. The line captures the bittersweet psychology of attachment: delight sharpened by frustration, intimacy edged with suffering. Even without a verified textual setting, the wording suggests a speaker who experiences passion as both nourishment and affliction, implying that intensity of feeling often carries its own cost.