POEMS & POÈMES
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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,
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