Our speaker sits on a summer night with two women—one whom he addresses throughout the poem, and her friend, whom he describes as "mild" and beautiful. They discuss poetry, and the speaker says that good lines should take a lot of work to compose, but should look like they only took a moment. He thinks that this might be why people who do manual labor or have practical jobs think that poetry isn't real work, but he says it is actually harder to write a good poem than it is to scrub floors all day.
The beautiful friend says that this is similar to the way women learn to cultivate beauty while making it look effortless; it actually takes a lot work to be beautiful, too. The speaker agrees, saying that, since the fall of Adam, making good things has required labor. It's like love, he goes on to muse; people used to put work into wooing their crushes, but now society thinks that is idle work, too. At this mention of love, all three of them become sad and silent. The speaker stares at the moon, thinking how it seems hollow. As the poem ends, he compares the surface of the moon to the heart, which gets worn down and weary as time goes by.