| Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907. | | | A Palace of Dreams, and Other Verse (1901)
VI. Lost Eden | | By Ada Bartrick Baker (1854– ) |
| | | IN my heart is a burning woe | |
| For a sin I sinn’d long years ago. | |
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| In those days my soul was mute, | |
| Satan had me under his foot. | |
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| He bade me pluck, that whispering devil, | 5 |
| The fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Evil. | |
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| Every fiend that laughs in hell | |
| Grinn’d with malice when I fell: | |
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| And my good Angel droop’d his wings, | |
| Sad to record such shameful things. | 10 |
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| But O! had I known the coming years, | |
| I should have wept with blood for tears; | |
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| Ah! God, if my soul had understood, | |
| I should have wept with tears of blood! | |
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| For now I know my bitter name: | 15 |
| ’Twould curse his life with fire and shame;— | |
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| His life—alas!—with shame and fire | |
| Who is the whole of my desire; | |
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| Who is the heaven I must forego. | |
| O me! my heart’s a burning woe! | 20 | | | |
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