In the second quatrain, Day and Night are personified as a pair of tyrants who were enemies to each other, but who have now shaken hands to join forces to torture the poet. Day tortures the poet with toil, Night tortures him by causing him to lament how far off the poet is from the young man. If "toil" is interpreted as the work of a poet, then the torture is a metaphor for the poet's anguish that his efforts to find poetic expressions and metaphors to describe the young man are not getting closer to the young man, but are moving away. This is not letting him sleep. The Day and the Night are disturbed that the young man, or at least his image, will not appear to the poet, so they attempt to torture it out of him.