“The wondrous moment of our meeting… I well remember you appear before me like a vision fleeting, a beauty's angel pure and clear.”

Pushkin wrote the poem in 1825 to Ekaterina Kern, and it works by returning to a single first meeting after the intervening years have scattered the poet's life. The beloved appears twice in the poem, identical, which is what makes the repetition an act of fidelity rather than nostalgia.