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Taking her handkerchief, she carefully brushed off the cobwebs that festooned the minarets, and murmured that fragment of Persian poetry which she once heard the absent master repeat to his mother, and which she had found, only a few days before, quoted by an Eastern traveller: "The spider hath woven his web in the imperial palaces; and the own hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab."
“The spider hath woven her web in the palace of kings, The owl hath sung her watch-song in the towers of Afrasiab.” Search was made for the body of Constantine, and it was found under a heap of slain, sword in hand, and so much disfigured that it was only known by the golden eagles worked on his buskins.
We have now in Brangaene's watch-song, and the instrumental nocturne that accompanies it, reached the highest point of the musical expression, not of the Tristan drama alone, but of all music since Palestrina. Before such music silence is the only thing possible. It scoffs at our words; it is not of this earth.
At sight of the vast buildings, their incomparable colonnades and cornices, their domeless stretches of marble and porphyry, he halted the second time, and in thought of the vanity of human glory, recited: "The spider hath woven his web in the imperial palace; And the owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab."
They are the voices of the night through which are heard the long-sustained notes of Brangaene's watch-song, wood instruments here and there uttering motives like passing dreams from the lovers' melodies: Realms where the air we breathe is love, Which in the winds on the waves doth move, Harmonizing this earth with what we feel above. At the end three trombones enter, sustaining slow chords.
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