Tonight the moon, by languorous memories obsessed,

The Moon more indolently dreams to-night

Lies pensive and awake: a sleepless beauty amid

Than a fair woman on her couch at rest,

The tossed and multitudinous cushions of her bed,

Caressing, with a hand distraught and light,

Caressing with an abstracted hand the curve of her breast.

Before she sleeps, the contour of her breast.

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

Upon her silken avalanche of down,

She lolls in the bright luxurious disarray of the sky —

Dying she breathes a long and swooning sigh;

Haggard, entranced — and watches the small clouds float by

And watches the white visions past her flown,

Uncurling indolently in the blue air like flowers.

Which rise like blossoms to the azure sky.

When now and then upon this planet she lets fall,

And when, at times, wrapped in her languor deep,

Out of her idleness and sorrow, a secret tear,

Earthward she lets a furtive tear-drop flow,

Some poet — an enemy of slumber, musing apart —

Some pious poet, enemy of sleep,

Catches in his cupped hands the unearthly tribute, all

Takes in his hollow hand the tear of snow

Fiery and iridescent like an opal's sphere,

Whence gleams of iris and of opal start,

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

And hides it from the Sun, deep in his heart.