Poems & poèmes/Double Being

by Natalie Clifford Barney

 

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.

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