POEMS & POÈMES

autres alliances

Par

NATALIE CLIFFORD BARNEY

ÉMILE-PAUL FRÈRES
ÉDITEURS A PARIS

GEORGE H. DORAN Co
ÉDITORS NEW-YORK

1920

CONTENTS


Apology
Ah! Night
The Love of Judas
The Weeping Venus
More Night!
The Phantom Guest
Double Being
Singing
On a Picture to Music
Loves Comrades
With two dwarf Japanese maples
Avertissement
The Flute-Player
A Parisian Roof Garden in 1918
How Write the Beat of Love
A la Campagne
A Pilgrimage
Backward
A Sonnet to My Lady with the Jaundice
Easter Day
Lines taken from Poems I shall not write
I Built a Fire
How Cold
Habit
The Near Enemy
Life

APOLOGY


While blue and khaki share the heroes mud,
And women tend in white or weep in grey,
Though all expressiveness seems over-dressed,
Yet some must wear the colours of their hearts
Upon their sleeves, like troubadours, of old;
And sing, and sometimes write their singing down.

... To "chase them from republics" were as vain
As to disturb the hurdy-gurdy man.
Let him go grinding music as he likes;
You see him turn his wheel, but need not hear
The tune he's playing in the noisy street?...

(Some have an organ, some an axe to grind,
While others seek how best to bury hatchets.)
We all are poets in our different ways
And may your dreams be harmless as my own.

AH! NIGHT!


Ah! night!
To feel the stab of beauty at the heart!
To drink, with lifted throat,
The silent throb and music of the stars,
The first kiss of the spring on spell-bound trees,
To stretch out arms to hold and soothe the world,
—A love too vast in aught to be contained,
Helpless and great: a poets youthfulness,...

Alone, might all this emptiness be you!

May first 1915

THE LOVE OF JUDAS


Love, take me back to you, and make me whole,
Who am divided and in unbelief:
An infidel in thought and word and grief,
A double heart and a promiscuous soul!

And what if Judas offered Christ that bowl
Of greatest bitterness without relief.
Revenge, not silver, tempted such a thief:
Betrayed betrayer of the kiss he stole.

He loved the most; those others loved but well,
They drowsed: in dreadful paths his anguish trod,
Nor thrice denied the love that sold his God.

No pity for his throbbing jealous side,
No pity for his false obscure farewell;
Yet he alone for his lost master died!

THE WEEPING VENUS


by Romaine


Laid out as dead in moonlight shroud
Beneath a derelict of cloud:
A double wreckage safe from flight,
High-caged as grief, in prisoned night.—
Unseeing eyes whose clustering tears
Tell the pure crystal of her years.—
No crown of thorns, no wounded side,
Yet as the God-man crucified,
Her body expiates the sin
That love and life with her begin!

MORE NIGHT!


Moon-love, star-love, the love of silver water.
The weeping face of love touched in the dark,
And murdered joy, lost souls of joy that caught her
A glow-worm's warmth and spark.

Birds of prey, invisible, now hover
About her midnights hammocked in unrest—
A moving shadow, faithless as a