Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.

By A Palace of Dreams, and Other Verse (1901). VI. Lost Eden

Ada Bartrick Baker (1854– )

IN my heart is a burning woe

For a sin I sinn’d long years ago.

In those days my soul was mute,

Satan had me under his foot.

He bade me pluck, that whispering devil,

The fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Evil.

Every fiend that laughs in hell

Grinn’d with malice when I fell:

And my good Angel droop’d his wings,

Sad to record such shameful things.

But O! had I known the coming years,

I should have wept with blood for tears;

Ah! God, if my soul had understood,

I should have wept with tears of blood!

For now I know my bitter name:

’Twould curse his life with fire and shame;—

His life—alas!—with shame and fire

Who is the whole of my desire;

Who is the heaven I must forego.

O me! my heart’s a burning woe!