The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poems & Poèmes, by Natalie Clifford Barney This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: Poems & Poèmes autres alliances Author: Natalie Clifford Barney Release Date: September 12, 2015 [EBook #49942] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS & POÈMES *** Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org (Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.) 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 lover, Is all her arms have pressed— Too luminous the dreaming of the sleeper Whose tears are prophecies and second-sight. Has death no under-sea, no darkness deeper, In which to satiate our need of night? THE PHANTOM GUEST We lay in shade diaphanous And spoke the light that burns in us As in the glooming's net I caught her, She shimmered like reflected water! Romantic and emphatic moods Are not for her whom life eludes... Its vulgar tinsel round her fold? She'd rather shudder with the cold, Attend just this elusive hour, A shadow in a shadow bower, A moving imagery so fine, It must have been her soul near mine And so we blended and possessed Each in each the phantom guest, Inseparate, we scarcely met; Yet other love-nights we forget! DOUBLE BEING A northern mind, a face from Italy, A double fate lived all too fatally, A look fresh as a childs, both soft and sharp, A clarion-voice, then liquid as a harp! A natural being, yet from nature freed, Like a Shakespearean boy of fairy breed— A sex perplexed into attractive seeming— Both sex at best, the strangeness so redeeming!— Hands hard to loosen if for once they cling, Yet frail as Leicester's wearing a queen's ring. A page-clothed Rosalind to play a part, A brow of genius and a lonely heart. SINGING Ethereal vibrations And soulful pulsations Of song, Afloat on the air —More aspiring than prayer— How strong The wings that uplift! As soaring adrift, A throng Of angels there are, And an echoing star, As along You rise ever higher, Sole voice of a choir How long Shall we follow your flight, Through crystaline night, And belong —Through the high vaults of space— To your archangel's face, And long, —With the heavens still ringing— To be one with your singing? ON A PICTURE TO MUSIC Music, language of the mortal soul. The face of twilight, The mouth of bitterness made lyrical, Eyes closed on poignant joys that might have been! A profile turned to life, and yet beyond ... Reborn, transfigured; penetrating sense To gather an acute expressiveness Vibrant within itself: all our lost lives! —We must play gently to the living dead— Fingers outstretched, by that responsive lid Where Angel harps lie buried at full length, Yet still in touch and resonant—Arise To laying on of hands— Invisible, a phantom of pure sound Voices the spirit sitting there, awakes The sighing, and the soaring and the beat (O dispossessed and silenced King: my heart!) Until we too are echos of that tide, Where winds and waves become articulate, Our being tossed so high, beyond itself, Winged by the elements! Our human weight of woe no longer felt Until we meet —By some familiar fall of minor chords— The inner God of Sorrow face to face. LOVE'S COMRADES You say I've lived too long in France And wearied of the senses' dance? Like fresh air in an opium den You'll lead me out—to where? and when? .... I fear no country's ready yet For our complexities: forget The best of flesh and food to go A'roaming o'er the world, and know Discomfort's great surprises few—? No, let me travel just to you! WITH TWO DWARF JAPANESE MAPLES These ancient trees for your new room. May many happy evenings fall With their reflections on the wall, Making embroideries of the gloom, And let their leaves of red and green Rustle with small desires and fears, But never water them with tears For all that is or has not been. Lives pass as shadows on a screen, Whether you dream or sing or sew, Or if some time Regret instead Should bow, my Loveliest, your head, Send me a leaf so I shall know: For Hope the green, for Love the red. AVERTISSEMENT Her name begins as Love begins, Mine as "November", "Nevermore". No thousand nights and one between these covers, No miniatures, enluminures or dyes— For art is but a prostitute that hovers To court outsiders—you alone may prize These pages which your idle hand unties?— ... Leaving art to artists—we, loves lovers, Keep for out-worn Beauty a disguise. —(A line traced round a shadow as it dies, Some semblance of the scattered rose recovers?)— So making everything seem otherwise: Associations are our deities! —And ivy leaves, transparent eggs of plovers Are fragments of the feast they symbolize.— Here, visible as sleeping Eros, lies A book of dreams and broken memories, A living past for which blind Love has eyes? THE FLUTE-PLAYER Her flute's clear solo greets the maiden day— Above the waking of melodious May, Its notes are like a trellised flight of flowers. The chirping birds whose orchestra of bills Accompanies rain—the tea-rose best distills— And then the smell of earth between the showers! From garden bright, in drops of crystal gown'd, I hear the breezes make a leafy sound Through vibrant buzz of flies that seek the shade— ... And wonder whether—as sweet noon reposes— The roses make the air, the air the roses Within the house kept cooler than a glade. Against the wall, upon the sunny side, Their fruitful branches fixed and crucified, The pear-trees stretch out arms in martyred line— While we that surfeit, nap, as calyx'd bees, Who murmurs, still pursuing imageries ... «Like Jewish candelabras». (relight mine!) Rising as to welcome a newcomer The flute pipes to the first eve of the summer —Nocturnal nature moves to minor bars— A golden crescent in a druid's tree Reminds her that the forest has a key— And out she goes to serenade the stars! A PARISIAN ROOF GARDEN IN 1918 As I must mount to feed those doves of ours, Perhaps you too will spend nocturnal hours Upon your roof So high aloof That from its terraced bowers We catch at clouds and draw a bath from showers. Before the moon has made all pale the night, Let's meet with flute and viol, and supper light: A yew lamb, minted sauce, a raisined bun, A melon riper than the melting sun— A flask of Xeres, that we've scarce begun— Well try the «lunar waltz» while floats afar Upon the liquid night—night's nenuphar. Or else, with senses tuned alike perchance, Reclining love will make the heavens dance; And if the enemy from aerial cars Drops death, we'll share it vibrant with the stars! HOW WRITE THE BEAT OF LOVE How write the beat of love, the very throb, The rhythm of our veins' deep eloquence? How fix that darkness-rending final sob, That perfect swoon of each united sense. The full-sailed rising of your body's sweep —Adrift and safe on joy's last tidal wave— Will toss you on the silver sands of sleep, Forgetful of the ecstacy you gave. Your breath ebbs restful as the falling tide: A sea becalmed!... Lay me in valleyed part Of breasts whose undulating crests subside— Ah how they marked the high beats of your heart! A LA CAMPAGNE The night, whose silences detach each sound, The leaves, as whispering heralds in a wood, Stir hopes of you about my solitude. Was that a carriage wheel upon the ground? —The grassy ground that brings the road uphill Would muffle horses hoofs—I listen still— A nervous motion at my heart: the bound Of too responsive veins—a hush profound. I hear a night bird call its mate?... a hound Out on the farm bark at some peasant maid Too tired with harvesting to feel afraid. ... Loosed, and now tied, scenting the sunny air, All day she combed and tossed the fields' dim hair, As some mute servant tending a fair queen She works in beauty neither felt nor seen, While I have nature, all the whole earth over, For company. Yet anxious as a lover Prisoned in sentiment, I watch and start. Is it then just for you I live apart? The moon, as milk caught in a pail, now flows Over its rim, whit'ning the dark that glows— I saw your absence less by day, and less This summers brilliant, living emptiness. II Another day in flowered light comes through The curtains of the room that waits for you. I leave it so, to its Byronian gloom: In vain red roses at your casements bloom. The lyre-shaped clock that once struck hours of gold, Has stopped, the prisoned summer air turns cold. The mirrors that no longer see you pass, Seem frames without their pictures, lengths of glass Bored to reflect a house without expression. Only my mind can image the procession Of past realities, that flitter by Invisible to all. These guides and I Live a repeated life in which we follow Through the deserted rooms, through tree-topped hollow Roads, the joyful phantoms gone before. The rhododendrons hedge-like corridor, Must lead you, now and ever, back to me! As often as our eyes have sought the sea, I rest mine on this woodland resting-place. Ah when again, the blossom of your face? And, many times to aid the incantation, Seeking some proof to fix my meditation, I pause where the soft earth still bears the seals Of your once-waiting and impatient heels! And stoop, to find again the marks I found, The little marks your feet leave on the ground! A PILGRIMAGE Is that your window with the moving shade In pilgrimage I've come so far to see? —The air may enter, you are not afraid Of the «great air» that plays invisibly About your neck, moving your opened hair (That busy shadow is perhaps your maid?) While I must wait, as near as I may be, Upon the sands, wishing that I were made Like Ariel to skip accross the sea Bringing you kisses, in small waves that bear The prostrate happy sun-flushed evening there, And all unseen cover you every where: To rise up with the tide and fall on you With lips that moisten, cling, and sting like spray— To want you, and so wanting turn away? Or beat my way into that prisoned hue: Now that your window is a golden square Cut in the darkness? Must I homeward fare With flapping cape against the wind to fight, Or like a sea-gull wing towards your light? D'une plage lointaine. BACKWARD "The predominacy of custom is every where visible, it sounds as a man would wonder to hear man profess, protest, engage, give great words, and then do just as they have done before, as though they were dead images and moved only by the wheels of custom." Francis BACON. My Hopes white-plumed, in valiant mail, Have beaten at her heart grown pale —Have failed, as all proud hopes must fail— Lower the mast, fold up the sail. In vain we faced the high-winged gale And laughed as those whom Gods assail. The reefs near port now crush our bark, The jealous hounds of habit bark On land. As children in the dark My Lady shudders in the veil Of her meek hair—shall naught prevail? And only fears their echo find Within her torn and timid mind? Helplessly, my courage tears To free her of the doubts she wears Closer than Life.... Yet Time prepares The end of all things.... Melt, my tears! And flow as bitter as the sea Over my drowning Love and me! A SONNET TO MY LADY WITH THE JAUNDICE. Was not Titania golden? See these flowers Are they for being yellowish less fair? Apollo and the Godesses all share In this most glorious hue. The jealous bowers Of Kings are coloured thus, their reed of powers, Their rings, their chains, the crowns that they must wear Golden their mistress and their minion's hair Golden the bannered sun above their towers! Reflecting butter-cups amuses Puck But flower-rubbed eye-lids, and complexions mend: So fear not broken crystals long ill-luck But look in this new mirror, lovely friend. Both gods and fairies wait on lovers wills. That jaundices be changed to daffodils! EASTER DAY Much longer than these lilies, you or I, This book lives on mysterious memory Of an enchanted place to which you lent A fragrance that will render somnolent? —Sweet poisons are narcotics for our tears! Our ressurected past through dreams appears An angel standing by an empty tomb. What sadder thing may Time spin on her loom Than words?—Return to that once petaled door Through which Love passed—adding a few leaves more To the strange book of life: open its covers Only to the worn page where we were lovers Lost in fair imageries, there to forget Our hearts that weep as little children yet! LINES TAKEN FROM POEMS I SHALL NOT WRITE Love, all our colours Fade into shadows —Shadows, but empty Forms of the darkness? Pale with the spring-time, Wandering without you— Sick with love-sickness! To sigh upon this chill air of December, To wonder why, and wondering why, remember! As through the air Her little fan-shaped feet What beauty in the way the light fell on her eye-brows.... These pages are as silent as drowned cries.... Come back, my Love, and with more fervent eyes Than pity, Lips that bear the ivy-leaf Once chose for emblem Love that never dies? Bow thy head, O shadow on the wall, And weep a shadows grief. ... And so the rain arrived instead of you! Its falling tears on the seas bitterness.... ... But I, who am loves prodigal and fool, What right have I to that high horse of verse? Whose wings in cadenced soaring sweep the sky Taking the waning moons for virgin dawns! Etherial beast to find a home in clouds And pasture on the plenteous voids of heaven! ... Small are these in love and in understanding ... Lift your voice in song, you alone can sing me Songs as white and strong as the marble columns Of Mitylene Songs as pure pure as stars on the silver midnights, Near as moonbeams over the limbs of lovers, Strange as sleep in fields of lethean stillness Heavy with summer. You alone can waken my soul to sorrow, You alone can mend all the broken music: Subtler tones of thought than this shattered singing Words have divided! I cannot weep for you as others weep. My last and dearest dead, For all my tears on lesser griefs are shed! I BUILT A FIRE I built a fire to welcome her, And my voice sighed Aloud her name. To be with her This night, I would have died.... Upon the hours, all in vain My tears, the rain, Fall uselessly, unceasingly.... The heavy door Has closed again ... again! I wait, yet know she will not brave The midnight,—give One hour more, so utterly to live; Wise and mild and shy, Afraid as the heart of a child, I know her heart to be. And mine, that naught will save, Must love and live and crave And break unceasingly! HOW COLD ... How cold the autumn night, Fearing that never more, As before, Will she pour In with the moonlight through my door. —On nights when the moon over-brimmed with light Was like a loving-cup she bore. ... My love, my love's delight, How are you lost? How fight Against an angels flight? Tarnished upon the floor The halo desire kept bright! Like a lonely child afright Questions each empty fold — When loves fairy tales are told, In midnights anguish might My golden head turn white Under the moons down-pour: In a moment a million moons more Drown, chill and cover me quite ... Rather than feel the cold, The gradual growing cold— Make me one with the autumn night. HABIT Ah! habit, how unmusical and shy That outworn miracle: our ecstacy! Between our hands that clasp their empty palms, This daily prayer is this our psalm of psalms! What is this nothing that was more than all? Thinned as a golden ring that dare not fall, That unsuspected danger: faithfulness, Has linked us strangers, and a something less! Exchanging vows and other platitudes, As beggars chained in separate solitudes, Though jealousy keep live the rotten core, Lovers that were be lovers nevermore. THE NEAR ENEMY Rash games of chess do hateful lovers play, Their towers, queens and kings all thrown away In wild offensives, desperate retreats. To that sick inner-sounding drum that beats In terror of some tender thing just killed! New warriors on the battle-field, unskilled In prudent war-fare: friends of yesterday What they most cherished seem most keen to slay. More treacherous than Prussians in command, Entrenched and feigning not to understand, They plan how best to poison, maim and mar! Masked in bad silence, turned against their star. Through what black forces are so changed to foes Those fed on our high hearts, yes, even those! LIFE Life, The unloosening of hands —The unloosening of little hands— About the heart. The welling up of tears: Old habits, old deaths, good-bye! You are sacred ground under my on-faring, I shall tread so lightly that you will not feel my leave-taking? Yet the breath of a new world—the ever promised-land—exalts my nostrils. I am on the war-path towards peace: The peace of single choice. Determination—onward, Evolutions open your arcana, Shower down your nearest spears of truth, Great fear throbs in me, fear that leads me on, I have shut my eyes long enough —Shut eyes grow blind!— Clinging to just one little human life! Limiting, repressing all it would not share, I who had an easy world to give In the first heart-beats of my hope— Yet now, with forty years, has come another youth —A youth in which I recognize myself! —Myself, how long you've lingered, waited, strayed— Beauty seems an empty shell—out-worn. Great longing of my sea, break forth, be uncontained!... Count not your shipwrecks—every spar may save. So I, not cruelly, not impetuously, But with keen, shrewd resolve—rise up. Why do I rise on timid stealthy feet? In the dark to take leave of the dark, To kiss the eyes of night farewell, And turn love's withered face full on the dawn. May the dawn learn through me, Not tint and play with empty shadows here, But raise the arch of triumph of its day. ... I hear a sound as of a world on flame. My past a burning city? Shall I look round? —Salt of my earth: all my tears crystalized! You'd call me back into the phantom house? —O, Psyche holding high your awkward lamp, O, Psyche, loved in darkness, see the day! FEMME Femme à la souple charpente, Au poitrail courbe, arqué pour Les gémissements d'amour, Mon désir suivra tes pentes— Tes veines, branchages nains Où la courbe rejoint l'angle; jambes fermant le triangle Du cher coffret féminin —O femme, source et brûlure— Je renverse dans ma main Ta tête—sommet humain. Cascade ta chevelure TIERCE-RIME Sensible auprès de toi, muet comme l'enfance, Je t'offris la pâleur de l'été maladif Dans une seule rose ouverte et sans défense. Quelle fée ouvragea, puis unit sans motif Ses pétales—qu'un fil de parfum semblait joindre— Et que tu vins casser d'un geste trop hâtif. Ils tombent un par un. Je te regarde feindre De ne pas voir combien se seront effeuillés. Ah! se défaire ainsi doucement sans se plaindre! Et j'embrasse en silence (aveugle que tu es!) De larmes, de baisers, tes deux mains que je touche Avec mes lèvres moins qu'avec mes cils mouillés. Et tu repars distraite, et moi je me recouche Sur tout ton souvenir.... Tel un pauvre histrion, Je mime un rôle ardent sur ta lointaine bouche! Et nous pleurons ensemble ainsi que nous rions A l'heure passagère et vide—Ta présence, Amour, n'est donc jamais ce que nous voudrions? Quand perdras-tu sur moi ton étrange puissance? Mon cœur malade, ah! quand va-t-il ne plus sentir, Ou des yeux oublieux de la convalescence, Quand pourrai-je sans peur te regarder partir? J'AVAIS CRAINT LA NEIGE J'avais craint la neige, Je vous avais espérée. —La neige est venue, La neige, Pareille à l'effeuillement De ces roses. Soyez la première à marcher sur la blancheur des pétales —Fleurs du froid effeuillées par l'hiver— Avant que d'autres ne les écrasent. Les pétales tombées, les étoiles fondantes se rejoignent, Dallage éphémère, Marquez l'empreinte de ses pieds tournés vers moi! Que la neige dans ma cour, Tachetée par ses pas, Soit un tapis d'hermine! SUFFISANCE Quand ton regard mi-clos, luisant entre tes cils, Peut évoquer l'amour sans forme et sans visage, Tu ne rêves donc plus aux amants de passage? —Quelle joie égalant ton dégoût t'offrent-ils?— Ils rôdent tels des loups à l'affût d'une proie, Désirant mat ton corps que leur désir salit; Mais, loin d'eux, ton désir, seul maître de ton lit, Reste le créateur nocturne de ta joie. Et lorsque le désir te tient éperdûment Livrée, et qu'il te rend plus ardente et plus souple, Lorsque ton être double, à la fois ton amant Et ta maîtresse, sait te prendre, mieux qu'un couple Tu t'exaltes, ton geste est plus harmonieux. N'aimant que Toi, tu plains la femme qui s'encombre Du danger des amours faciles; toi, les yeux Pleins d'orgueil, tu ne sert qu'à ta beauté, dans l'ombre. VERS LIBRES Ils sont là, quelque part, les êtres de mon cœur, Dans de sombres demeures, Gardés par des esclaves ... Moi, je vais sans entraves, Et me navre de leurs peurs. J'abattrai les cloisons De leurs dures maisons, Les sauvant de leurs murs, Car c'est moi qui endure La vue de leurs prisons ... Et pendant que toi tu dors, C'est moi que l'on enferme—dehors! UN VIEUX CHAT DE MISÈRE Un vieux chat de misère Est entré dans ma serre, Chargé des éléments Electriques de l'orage— Ses yeux, charbons ardents, Brûlent au dedans De sa tête sans pelage— De sa vieille tête d amant, Déchiquetée par la guerre, L amour et le carnage; Il manque d'aliments, Non d'ongles ni de dents! Enviez-les gens prudents, Soupirez, ô femmes sages! DISTIQUES Tu veux que je te fasse un amoureux poème. Ecoute donc plutôt si mon silence t'aime! Je ne saurais donner au sage alexandrin Les plaintes du plaisir, le rythme de nos reins! Quand, sous mon corps élu, je sens battre ta joie, Exprimer mon désir qui t'effleure et te broie? Sois ma maîtresse douce et folle; au lieu de mots