Serenade by Djuna Barnes
Serenade
by Djuna Barnes
Three paces down the shore, low sounds the lute,
The better that my longing you may know;
I’m not asking you to come,
But—can’t you go?
Three words, “I love you,” and the whole is said—
The greatness of it throbs from sun to sun;
I’m not asking you to walk,
But—can’t you run?
Three paces in the moonlight’s glow I stand,
And here within the twilight beats my heart.
I’m not asking you to finish,
But—to start.
Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) is one of the more striking and less-read American modernists — central figure of 1920s Parisian literary life, author of the foundational queer-modernist novel Nightwood (1936), and a near-recluse for the last forty years of her life in a small apartment on Patchin Place in Greenwich Village. This is such a cheeky, subversive serenade, desire and refusal, and subversive was what Barnes was known for. Each ending with a refrain that pretends to lower its demand while actually raising it, “I'm not asking you to come, but — can't you go?”, “I'm not asking you to walk, but — can't you run?, “I'm not asking you to finish, but — to start.” Serenade is from her early period, when she was working as a journalist and illustrator in New York and writing the lyrics that would become The Book of Repulsive Women (1915) and various uncollected pieces.
