The poem begins by praising a woman as the beautiful night, so lovely that even the stars get lost in her. But the praise keeps getting interrupted. From her wrists and lips unwind lost coins and "a spiral of effluvia" that we call history, and the poem drifts to the Israelites and Arabs at war, far from the moon's quiet garden. Beauty and violence sit side by side, and neither cancels the other.
The speaker seems to ask what poets can do with this. Whether by skill or by slow evolution, someone sings a rough, "gravelly" song until something larger joins in. The ending narrows to a single star, a teardrop in orbit, and then to something small and physical: the speaker's hands on the small of her back.
The mood is tender but uneasy, a love poem shadowed by the world's troubles. The title suggests the speaker is talking to older poets about how to praise beauty now.