Pauline Tarn’s Sonnet
When we last left Pauline, she was on a train with her mother from Bar Harbor to Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her emotional state was fragile. In later letters, she would recount how hurt she had been by Natalie’s inattentiveness in Bar Harbor.[1] Consciously or unconsciously, Pauline had begun to suspect that Natalie and Eva were having an affair. Even the thought of such a thing was heartbreaking. It made her realize she still wanted Natalie and ran the risk of losing her, given Natalie’s long history with Eva. At some point, Pauline began drafting a poem of jealous obsession:
Sous un ciel ambigu, l’olivier et l’acanthe
Mêlent subtilement leurs frissons bleus et verts,
Et dans l’ombre fleurit, comme un songe pervers,
L’harmonieux baiser de l’amante à l’amante.
Les cheveux au brun roux d’automne et d’amaranthe
Et les pâles cheveux plus blonds que les hivers
Confondent leurs reflets. Sur les yeux entr’ouverts
Passe une joie aigüe ainsi qu’une épouvante.
Le crépuscule rose a baigné l’horizon.
Les désirs attardés craignent la trahison
Et le rire sournois de l’aurore importune.
Les doigts ont effeuillé les lotos du sommeil,
Et la virginité farouche de la lune
A préféré la mort au viol du soleil.[2]
Below a shifting sky, the olive and acanthus
are quivering together, blue and green,
their kisses blooming—terrifying dream
of women intertwining in the shadows.
Auburn autumn hair, which lays their bed,
and pale hair, fairer than the snow is white,
unite their shimmering. Half-closing eyes, alight
with joy that deepens, darkens into dread.
The setting sun is bathed in pink.
Lingering desires shrink
from broken faith, and daylight’s sneer.
Fingers stroke the buds of opium.
The Moon in her fierce, wild virginity
chose death to being ravished by the Sun.
Pauline Tarn would publish this sonnet three years later under the pen name Renée Vivien. It is proof positive of what Vivien scholars have tried for so long to deny: that Pauline was working directly from life, even while producing highly stylized portraits.
Knowing what we now know about the sequence of events in the fall of 1900, we make a radical departure from previous readings of Vivien. The untitled sonnet “Below a shifting sky” (“Sous un ciel ambigu”) now reveals itself to be autobiographical. The first quatrain establishes a dreamscape. In the first line, the olive and acanthus are a Greek architectural motif, featured in the columns at the Erechtheion. In the second line, they have come to life. Two women are making love in the shadow of their leaves. Who are they?
In the second quatrain, they are clearly identified as Eva Palmer, whose long red hair was even more famous than she was, and Natalie Barney, whose hair was an unusually pale blond. The comparison to amaranth refers not only to intensity of color but to length and motion. Amaranth blossoms are a deep reddish purple, but they also tumble down like locks of hair. Like amaranth, the red hair in the poem blankets the two lovers, hiding their bodies from view. The comparison to autumn is not only a stock phrase—it dates the poem to the fall season.
This is a poem of slippages. The clouds shifting in the wind might rain, or they might not. The olive and acanthus were first described as stone carvings; now they are leafy branches. Red and blond hair mingle so intimately the speaker cannot tell them apart. Are the lovers half-closing their eyes in joy? Or is the speaker (Pauline) half-closing hers in dread? Whose lingering desires are shrinking? Whose fingers stroke the buds of opium flowers (lotos in the French)?
There are two storylines here. Pauline is documenting Natalie and Eva’s affair and her own emotional participation in it. She is curious, desiring, then horrified. Unlike Natalie (whose silvery blond hair aligns her with the Moon), Pauline would rather die than learn the truth. She equates learning the truth with the violence of rape (in French, viol) and even lays the blame on Eva. (Eva’s fiery red hair aligns her with the Sun.) The truth, seen in the light, is a violation.
What truth is Pauline so frightened of? In other early poems, she imagines lesbian sex and BDSM-like scenarios with pleasure.[3] Was the fantasy of a threesome too disturbing for her?
Two versions of this poem exist. The version above is from the second edition of Etudes and Preludes (Etudes et préludes), launched in 1903 after Pauline had left Natalie for motorist and writer Hélène van Zuylen van Nijevelt van de Haar, born a Rothschild.[4] The version from the first (1901) edition is an entirely different poem. It begins with a fevered night sky, which turns silver at dawn’s “cool hands” (mains fraîches, borrowed from the Homeric simile “rosy-fingered dawn”), which, laughing, caress but do not dissipate the clouds. There are no references to red or blond hair. The speaker is not a voyeur but a participant, addressing one woman, her lover, whose eyes have the glow of stagnant waters and whose loveliness pales in the morning. The two lovers, speaker and listener, are afraid of being seen in the daylight. Only the last two lines in the 1901 edition are somewhat similar to those of 1903:
Vois, la virginité de la lune expirante
A préféré la mort au baiser du soleil.[5]
See, the dying Moon’s virginity
chose death before the kisses of the Sun.
The meaning of these two lines is not the same. In the 1901 edition, the Moon is a lesbian who refuses to join the daylight world of heterosexual society by allowing herself to be courted by a man, the Sun. (Grammatical gender plays a symbolic role. In French, the word for Moon, lune, is feminine, while Sun, soleil, is masculine.) This is about two lesbian lovers clinging to each other in the face of social disapproval. It is the heterosexism of the outside world that is cramping their style in the bedroom. There is no lesbian love triangle here.
The real-life love triangle among Pauline, Natalie, and Eva was actually playing out in the fall of 1900, only six months before the 1901 edition appeared. How strange that the version of this sonnet published in 1901 insists on the bond between the two lovers, speaker and listener, whereas the version published in 1903, three years after the fact, recounts the breaking of that bond.
As all writers know, a publishing timeline is not necessarily a writing timeline. Which version did Pauline write first? Could she have written the love-triangle version in the fall of 1900, only to rewrite the poem when she moved in with Natalie early in 1901? If so, did she choose to publish the love-triangle version in 1903 for the same reason she began to publish as Renée Vivien rather than R. Vivien? 1903 was the year when Pauline began refusing to self-censor. That shift ran deeper than we knew.
While in Kalamazoo, Pauline witnessed the agonizing death of her cousin Will after a long illness.[6] It affected her profoundly. It also delayed her plans to rejoin Natalie—wherever Natalie was to be found. We know that all three families—the Tarns, the Barneys, and the Abbes—planned to spend Thanksgiving in New York.[7]
On Tuesday, October 16, Pauline finally received a letter from Natalie. She replied the same day: “I sought in vain to telephone you, but I was told that Miss Shipley’s School had no telephone apparatus” (“J’ai vainement cherché à te téléphoner, on m’a dit que Miss Shiply’s [sic] School n’avait point d’appareil téléphonique”).[8] She knew Natalie was planning to depart for New York on October 23 or 24. If Pauline did arrive the following week, would she be too late?
Natalie’s reply to Pauline, probably by telegraph, has not yet been found. But we do know that Natalie immediately wrote to Eva: “Pauline has been detained by a sick cousin and will not be here for seven days...so hurry back that we may have a little time alone.”[9] Here is evidence that Natalie and Eva were taking pains not to be discovered in bed together by Pauline. Natalie and Eva knew they were keeping an explosive secret. The intensity suggests that Natalie was torn between two lovers. Natalie was so in love, so addicted to love with Eva (“hurry back”), that she could not bear a moment apart, while Eva, it seems, found the composure and self-discipline to take herself away and keep a respectful distance from Pauline.[10]
Did Eva return to spend more time with Natalie? She was planning to do so.[11] Did Pauline arrive on time to join Natalie? We do not know that either. Did Pauline ever reach Shipley at all?
We have to look at Barney’s 1960 memoir for answers. Curiously, Barney never states that she spent time at Bryn Mawr with Eva. Instead, she reports that she and Pauline stayed in Eva’s rooms at Radnor Hall. (We know this was untrue.) Pauline (referred to as Renée) “sadly continued her solitary walks along the outskirts of the college” (“continuait tristement ses promenades solitaires aux alentours du collège”), where she “discovered an old cemetery where, haunted by Violet’s death, she lingered” (“elle avait découvert un vieux cimetière où la hantise de la mort de Violette l’avait retenue”).[12] Here again Barney’s recollection falters. Violet Shillito was still very much alive in the fall of 1900; she did not die until the spring of 1901. Could Barney have misremembered the date of Violet’s death? Or did she deliberately alter the facts?
For that matter, are we certain it was Pauline who lingered in the cemetery? By the time Barney was writing her memoir, The Three Sapphos were long broken up. Both Pauline and Eva were dead. Eva had infuriated Natalie by marrying the Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos. Eva’s legacy, as well as her husband’s, depended on her reputation as a faithful wife. But Eva continued having discreet lesbian affairs throughout her life, and the record shows that the flame between Eva and Natalie never really died. In contrast, Pauline had made her name as a lesbian poet. In her memoir, could Barney have substituted Pauline in order to protect Eva?
Let’s return a moment to Barney’s recollection of Pauline in the cemetery. If true, this would be the first documentary evidence that situates Pauline—the real Pauline, not just the speaker of her poems—in a graveyard. The cemetery in question would have been the Harriton one, a family burial ground opened by the tobacco planter Richard Harrison in 1719. By the fall of 1900, the cemetery held the remains of Harrison, his descendants, and the enslaved people who had worked in the family’s house.[13] The ivy-covered walls and fading headstones can still be found in the woods near Bryn Mawr’s campus. The graves have been virtually undisturbed since The Three Sapphos visited more than 125 years ago. It would be interesting for analysts of Vivien’s poetry to look here for material Pauline may have mined for works that were once thought to be purely imaginative. The Harriton setting might be contrasted, for instance, with Violet’s burial site at St. Germain-en-Laye outside Paris.
When did Pauline learn the truth about Natalie and Eva? When did she allow herself to contemplate the facts and the implications? Was it before or after she and Natalie departed for Europe, each on separate liners (Pauline bound for London, Natalie for Paris)? If she did wander the woods by Bryn Mawr, and if she did come upon the Harriton burial ground, was the death of her love that occupied her thoughts?
The contrast between the two versions of Pauline Tarn’s sonnet “Below a shifting sky” is an argument for a critical edition of her poetry, one that would collate the variants in each edition published in her lifetime. Scholars have always known that Renée Vivien was an inveterate reviser. Now we know that at least some of the revisions had personal meanings for Pauline.
It is also an argument for acknowledging the significance of history and biography in the work of poets like Renée Vivien. Readers need to know the facts of a writer’s life and times in order to fully understand their work. That work—what critics and theorists call “the text”—does not spring into being from empty air. It is work because people create it. That act of creation, that process, takes place in hands that write or type, mouths that feel and form the shape of words, bodies that move through the world, nerves that remember. (Not to mention the erotic sensations perceived by hands, mouths, bodies, and nerves.) Even when a writer is long dead, traces of that process (and those sensations) remain in her work, just as traces of her life remain in her archive, if she has one.
When her work is written in code, her life is the cypher key.
Notes
[1] See, for example: Pauline Tarn (as Paule) to Natalie Barney (Tout-Petit), 11 August [1901], in Pauline Tarn (as Renée Vivien), Je suis tienne irrévocablement, no. 80 (pp. 127–29); Pauline Tarn (as Pauline) to Natalie Barney, 22 August [1901], in Je suis tienne irrévocablement, no. 86 (pp. 135–36, esp. 135).
[2] Pauline Tarn (as Renée Vivien), Etudes et préludes, 2nd ed. (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1903), 123–26.
[3] For BDSM in Pauline Tarn’s early poetry, see: “Victoire,” in Etudes et préludes (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1901), 43–44; “Amazone,” in Etudes et préludes, 143–44; “Ressemblance inquiétante,” in Cendres et poussières (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1902), 63–64; “Désir,” in Cendres et poussières, 43–44. These poems have been translated by Samantha Pious in A Crown of Violets (Sequim, WA: Headmistress Press, 2015, revised 2017).
[4] Suzanne Stroh, afterword to Natalie Barney, I Remember Her, 100. Pauline Tarn’s second book, Cendres et poussières (Ashes and Dust) (1902), was dedicated to “H. C. L. B.,” a re-ordering (perhaps a mis-print) of the Baroness’s birth initials: Hélène Betty Louise Caroline de Rothschild.
[5] Pauline Tarn (as R. Vivien), Etudes et préludes (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1901), 135–36 (lines 13–14).
[6] Pauline Tarn (“Paul”) to Natalie Barney (“Chère”), 16 Oct. 1900, in Je suis tienne irrévocablement, no. 64 (pp. 96–100, esp. 98).
[7] Pauline even considered fleeing Bar Harbor for New York when tensions with her mother were running high. Pauline Tarn (“Pauline”) to Natalie Barney, n.d. [end of Aug.? 1900], in Je suis tienne irrévocablement, no. 58 (p. 90). The Tarns had booked a long-term stay in a New York hotel, as chronicled in various news reports.
[8] Pauline Tarn (“Paul”) to Natalie Barney (“Chère”), 16 Oct. 1900, in Je suis tienne irrévocablement, no. 64 (pp. 96–100, esp. 99).
[9] Pauline’s letter could not have arrived the day it was sent, and there was no telephone at Shipley, so Pauline must have sent a telegraph.
[10] Eva had joined her mother in Boston. Natalie Barney to Eva Palmer, 14 Oct. 1900, NCB-EP C2 2995 6-9/330, fonds Natalie Clifford Barney, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris.
[11] In her letter to Eva, Natalie wrote that it would “a rainy day until you come back.” See note 107.
[12] Barney, Souvenirs indiscrets, 67.
[13] “Harriton Cemetery (Harrison Family),” Lower Merion Historical Society, accessed 25 Feb. 2026 at https://collections.lowermerionhistory.org/home/burial-records/harriton-cemetery/; Grace Pusey, “Early Bryn Mawr Black History, 1791–1824,” Black at Bryn Mawr (blog), https://blackatbrynmawr.blogs.brynmawr.edu/2015/06/09/harriton/.