I’d Have You Think of Me
As one who, leaning on the wall, once drew
Thick blossoms down, and hearkened to the hum
Of heavy bees slow rounding the wet plum,
And heard across the fields the patient coo
Of restless birds bewildered with the dew.
As one whose thoughts were mad in painful May,
With melancholy eyes turned toward her love,
And toward the troubled earth whereunder throve
The chilly rye and coming hawthorn spray—
With one lean, pacing hound, for company.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 6, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I’d Have You Think of Me” originally appeared in A Book (Boni and Liveright, 1923) by Djuna Barnes and later in her collection of poetry and prose, A Night Among the Horses (Horace Liveright, 1929). In her essay, “Djuna Barnes and T. S. Eliot: Authority, Resistance, and Acquiescence,” Miriam Fuchs of University of Hawaii at Manoa wrote: “Like other women writers of her generation, Djuna Barnes lived unconventionally and wrote unconventionally. She followed her own dictates, desires, and conscience and believed, as Virginia Woolf declared, that ‘I can take my way: experiment with my own imagination in my own way.’ However much Barnes and other women modernists like H.D. and Anaïs Nin insisted on their own independence and untraditional lifestyles, they were nonetheless involved in critical male-female collaborative and mentoring relationships. Ezra Pound and H.D., Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, T. S. Eliot and Djuna Barnes: each association offers insights into the male- female dynamics in the production and reception of women’s writing.”
Djuna Barnes
