Darrell Gray's address to the Romantic poets begins by agreeing with them. "Yes, she is the beautiful night," the speaker says, as if answering an old argument and conceding the point. The night is a woman so lovely that "the stars get lost in her." Before the second stanza is over, though, the poem has dropped something dirtier into that glamorous sky, and the rest of it holds the old praise and the modern world together without letting either cancel the other.
The turn comes with "And yet," a phrase the poem uses twice. From the night's "wrists and lips unwind / The perilous dimes lost in subways." The image is odd and good. Dimes are small, silver and easily lost, so they can pass for tiny stars, but they have fallen out of the sky into a city. What unwinds from her is "a spiral of effluvia / We recognize as history." The word "effluvia" suggests waste or runoff, and that is a blunt verdict on the human past. The poem backs it up at once with "The Israelites / Must battle the Arabs," placed "far from the moon's bright garden." The poem gives no context for this line, and it needs none. It shows history as a conflict that never ends, and it sets that against the garden's calm, where the rose is "insomniac." That adjective suits a flower that never closes. It could also describe the people lying awake over the news.
The second "And yet" brings a softer register. Now she is "the night of beauty," an angel whose name "Lifts the wet grass / And topples the insect gently / Onto lower leaves." The scale has shrunk from stars and wars to one insect being tipped off a blade of grass, and the verbs, "lifts" and "topples," are careful and unthreatening. Beauty here does not cancel history. It works at a size where gentleness can still be seen.
The fourth stanza turns to the poet himself, in a hedged, almost shrugging tone. "Let him rise by skill / Or evolution's shaky ladder" says the singer may owe his gift to craft or to biology, and the poem declines to choose. The song he sings is "gravelly," a rough word set against the smooth Romantic nightingale tradition the title points to. The poem is also modest about where song comes from: "Whatever it is sings with us." The pronoun "it" is deliberately vague, and "with us" makes the singing a shared act, not the privilege of a genius. The stanza ends on "her single star," and the contrast matters. At the start, many stars were lost in her. Now praise settles on one.
The last three lines pull that star into the body. "A gravelly teardrop flung in orbit" repeats "gravelly," tying the song to the teardrop. It also seems to hide "gravity," which is what keeps anything in orbit. Then comes the plain human gesture: "My hands at the small / Of your back." The line break after "small" makes the sentence pause on smallness before the phrase finishes. The poem has moved from cosmos to city to insect to one touch, and it ends with no argument, only a hand placed on a person.
The poem has no rhyme and no fixed meter. Its lines run from short to medium, and the dashes after "history" and "leaves" work like held breaths. Its sound is more textured than regular. "Lifts the wet grass" has a soft, damp feel, while "gravelly song" grinds, and the poem uses both. Repetition does the structural work: "night" and "beauty" swap places in "the beautiful night" and "the night of beauty," and "lost" appears twice, first in the stars and then in the dimes.
The poem is worth reading because it neither mocks the Romantics nor copies them. It keeps their vocabulary of moon, rose, night and angel, lets history and subway grit leak in, and still ends up praising. Its answer to how a poet can write about beauty after knowing all this is a rough, honest song, and then a hand at someone's back.