In Bodenheim’s seven-line lyric, two inner states meet like living bodies and produce a small drama of renewal. The first mood is hollowed out: its heart is a “flagon of ashes,” a vessel that once held heat or wine but now holds only residue. The second mood is not a clean opposite but a dormant intoxication. Its lips are “stained / With the odors of sleeping wine-songs,” a phrase that crosses smell and sound so that music becomes something almost physical, held in the mouth and not yet released. The meeting is intimate and strange. The wine-scented mood “kissed the breast of the first,” and through that kiss transfers “his pale purple breath” into the ashen flagon.
The central action is this filling. Breath is normally invisible and warm, but here it has a color—pale purple—and that color is deliberately ambiguous. Purple can suggest wine, bruise, dusk, or something regal; “pale” keeps it from becoming rich or joyful. The second mood does not bring a bright flame to the ashes. It gives a washed-out, wine-tinted breath, enough to change emptiness into something newly occupied but not triumphant. Bodenheim implies that emotional revival is often just such a half-tinted thing: not a blaze, but a pale transfusion.
What follows matters as much as the kiss. “Then the two moods died,” the poem says, without mourning them. Their death is not failure. The old man who carried them—the figure inside the poem, not necessarily a literal person—sits down “to make others.” That final phrase turns the lyric into a small creation myth of the inner life. Moods are not permanent possessions; they are made, they meet, they alter one another, they pass. The old man’s age suggests long experience with this cycle, and “sat down” gives the ending a deliberate, almost artisan calm. He is less a victim of feeling than a maker who knows the next mood must be shaped.
The poem is written as one long grammatical sentence. This gives the “Meeting” a forward pressure that mirrors the movement from empty vessel to kiss, from kiss to death, and from death to new making. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, so the music comes from smaller effects: the near-assonance of “flagon” and “ashes,” the alliterative insistence of “pale purple,” the compound “wine-songs” that fuses pleasure and art into one object. The line break after “stained” suspends the image briefly, letting the stain linger before its source is revealed. Even the noun “mood” is treated as a character rather than a description, so the poem works like a compressed fable rather than a confession.
That is where the significance lies. Bodenheim does not say “I felt empty and then inspired.” He turns the experience into a physical encounter between two strange beings, then quietly observes their passing. The result is a short ars poetica of feeling: moods are not facts to report but materials to shape. Because the old man immediately makes others, the poem refuses despair. It ends not with loss but with the beginning of another unseen meeting.