To-night the Moon dreams with increased weariness,

Tonight the moon, by languorous memories obsessed,

Like a beauty stretched forth on a downy heap

Lies pensive and awake: a sleepless beauty amid

Of rugs, while her languorous fingers caress

The tossed and multitudinous cushions of her bed,

The contour of her breasts, before falling to sleep.

Caressing with an abstracted hand the curve of her breast.

On the satin back of the avalanche soft,

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

She falls into lingering swoons, as she dies,

She lolls in the bright luxurious disarray of the sky —

While she lifteth her eyes to white visions aloft,

Haggard, entranced — and watches the small clouds float by

Which like efflorescence float up to the skies.

Uncurling indolently in the blue air like flowers.

When at times, in her languor, down on to this sphere,

When now and then upon this planet she lets fall,

She slyly lets trickle a furtive tear,

Out of her idleness and sorrow, a secret tear,

A poet, desiring slumber to shun,

Some poet — an enemy of slumber, musing apart —

Takes up this pale tear in the palm of his hand

Catches in his cupped hands the unearthly tribute, all

(The colours of which like an opal blend),

Fiery and iridescent like an opal's sphere,

And buries it far from the eyes of the sun.

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