Tonight the moon, by languorous memories obsessed,

More drowsy dreams the moon tonight. She rests

Lies pensive and awake: a sleepless beauty amid

Like a proud beauty on heaped cushions pressing,

The tossed and multitudinous cushions of her bed,

With light and absent-minded touch caressing,

Caressing with an abstracted hand the curve of her breast.

Before she sleeps, the contour of her breasts.

Surrendered to her deep sadness as to a lover, for hours

On satin-shimmering, downy avalanches

She lolls in the bright luxurious disarray of the sky —

She dies from swoon to swoon in languid change,

Haggard, entranced — and watches the small clouds float by

And lets her eyes on snowy visions range

Uncurling indolently in the blue air like flowers.

That in the azure rise like flowering branches.

When now and then upon this planet she lets fall,

When sometimes to this earth her languor calm

Out of her idleness and sorrow, a secret tear,

Lets streak a stealthy tear, a pious poet,

Some poet — an enemy of slumber, musing apart —

The enemy of sleep, in his cupped palm,

Catches in his cupped hands the unearthly tribute, all

Takes this pale tear, of liquid opal spun

Fiery and iridescent like an opal's sphere,

With rainbow lights, deep in his heart to stow it

And hides it from the sun for ever in his heart.

Far from the staring eyeballs of the Sun.