Poem of the Week

This poem, Call of the Night was published in 1911 by Barnes. After recognition for her poems, she became a freelance journalist and illustrator for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in NYC. She worked there until 1921, where she was commissioned by McCall’s magazine to work in Paris for journalism and poetry. She lived there for 10 years, and during that time she wrote an anthology, The Book, which included three stories A Night Among the Horses, Ladies Almanack, and Ryder. The next ten years of her life were spent travelling across cities in England and Egypt, New York City, NY, Paris, France. During her travels she wrote Nightwood. She returned to New York in 1939 to live and write one last piece, Antiphon, before her death in 1982.

Call of the Night

Djuna Barnes, 1892 - 1982

Dark, and the wind-blurred pines,

          With a glimmer of light between.

Then I, entombed for an hourless night

          With the world of things unseen.

Mist, the dust of flowers,

          Leagues, heavy with promise of snow,

And a beckoning road ‘twixt vale and hill,

          With the lure that all must know.

A light, my window’s gleam,

          Soft, flaring its squares of red—

I loose the ache of the wilderness

          And long for the fire instead.

You too know, old fellow?

          Then, lift your head and bark.

It’s just the call of the lonesome place,

          The winds and the housing dark.

"Call of the Night" was published in Harper's Weekly on Dec. 23, 1911. It appears in Barnes' "Collected Poems: With Notes Toward the Memoirs" (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).

Written by Keira Zirkle