Iris By Night

by Robert Frost

　　One misty evening, one another's guide,

　　We two were groping down a Malvern side

　　The last wet fields and dripping hedges home.

　　There came a moment of confusing lights,

　　Such as according to belief in Rome

　　Were seen of old at Memphis on the heights

　　Before the fragments of a former sun

　　Could concentrate anew and rise as one.

　　Light was a paste of pigment in our eyes.

　　And then there was a moon and then a scene

　　So watery as to seem submarine;

　　In which we two stood saturated, drowned.

　　The clover-mingled rowan on the ground

　　Had taken all the water it could as dew,

　　And still the air was saturated too,

　　Its airy pressure turned to water weight.

　　Then a small rainbow like a trellis gate,

　　A very small moon-made prismatic bow,

　　Stood closely over us through which to go.

　　And then we were vouchsafed a miracle

　　That never yet to other two befell

　　And I alone of us have lived to tell.

　　A wonder! Bow and rainbow as it bent,

　　Instead of moving with us as we went

　　(To keep the pots of gold from being found),

　　It lifted from its dewy pediment

　　Its two mote-swimming many-colored ends

　　And gathered them together in a ring.

　　And we stood in it softly circled round

　　From all division time or foe can bring

　　In a relation of elected friends.