A man and woman share a fleeting, perfect moment — a “mood” they almost manage to hold still — as one summer night slips into day. The speaker feels both the brevity and the intensity of that union. There’s a giddy sense of power in the middle of the poem, as if the world itself is answering only to them, thundering along with their shared pulse. But the opening and closing lines frame everything in the rhythms of time and death. So the feeling is complex: wonder and a kind of defiant joy. The poem doesn’t mourn how quickly it passes. Instead, it insists that the marvel of being alive, of sun and earth, exists exactly *because* of such connections and the longing that pulls two people together. The mood is intimate, warm, and quietly euphoric — like a secret you carry into the daylight.
Between the Dusk of a Summer Night — Summary
Between the dusk of a summer night And the dawn of a summer day, We caught at a mood as it passed in flight, And we bade it stoop and stay. And what with the dawn of night began With the dusk of day was done; For that is the way of woman and man, When a hazard has made them one. Arc upon arc, from shade to shine, The World went thundering free; And what was his errand but hers and mine -- The lords of him, I and she? O, it's die we must, but it's live we can, And the marvel of earth and sun Is all for the joy of woman and man And the longing that makes them one.