Eunice Tietjens
Reading edition
Eunice Tietjens (née Hammond) was born in Chicago, Illinois, July 29, 1884. She married Paul Tietjens, the composer, in 1904. During 1914 and 1916 she was Associate Editor of Poetry; A Magazine of Verse and went to France as war correspondent of the Chicago Daily News (1917-18). Her second marriage (to Cloyd Head, the writer) occurred in February, 1920.
Profiles from China (1917) is a series of sketches of people, scenes and incidents observed in the interior. Written in a fluent free verse, the poems in this collection are alive with color and personality. The succeeding Body and Raiment (1919) is less integrated, more derivative and diffuse. And yet, in spite of certain obvious echoes, individual poems like “The Drug Clerk,” “The Steam Shovel” and a few others are worthy to stand beside her distinguished first volume.
290
THE MOST-SACRED MOUNTAIN
Space, and the twelve clean winds of heaven,
And this sharp exultation, like a cry, after the slow six thousand steps of climbing!
This is Tai Shan, the beautiful, the most holy.
Below my feet the foot-hills nestle, brown with flecks of green; and lower down the flat brown plain, the floor of earth, stretches away to blue infinity.
Beside me in this airy space the temple roofs cut their slow curves against the sky,
And one black bird circles above the void.
Space, and the twelve clean winds are here;
And with them broods eternity—a swift, white peace, a presence manifest.
The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place. This is the end that has no end.
Here when Confucius came, a half a thousand years before the Nazarene, he stepped, with me, thus into timelessness.
The stone beside us waxes old, the carven stone that says: On this spot once Confucius stood and felt the smallness of the world below.
The stone grows old.
Eternity
Is not for stones.
291But I shall go down from this airy space, this swift white peace, this stinging exultation;
And time will close about me, and my soul stir to the rhythm of the daily round.
Yet, having known, life will not press so close,
And always I shall feel time ravel thin about me.
For once I stood
In the white windy presence of eternity.
THE DRUG CLERK
The drug clerk stands behind the counter
Young and dapper and debonair....
Before him burn the great unwinking lights,
The hectic stars of city nights,
Red as hell’s pit, green as a mermaid’s hair.
A queer half-acrid smell is in the air.
Behind him on the shelves in ordered rows
With strange, abbreviated names
Dwell half the facts of life. That young man knows,
Bottled and boxed and powdered here,
Dumb tragedies, deceptions, secret shames,
And comedy and fear.
Sleep slumbers here, like a great quiet sea
Shrunk to this bottle’s compass; sleep that brings
Sweet respite from the teeth of pain
To those poor tossing things
292That the white nurses watch so thoughtfully.
And here again
Dwell the shy souls of Maytime flowers
That shall make sweeter still those poignant hours
When wide-eyed youth looks on the face of love.
And, for those others who have found too late
The bitter fruits thereof,
Here are cosmetics, powders, paints,—the arts
That hunted women use to hunt again
With scented flesh for bait.
And here is comfort for the hearts
Of sucking babes in their first teething pain.
Here dwells the substance of huge fervid dreams,
Fantastic, many-colored, shot with gleams
Of ecstasy and madness, that shall come
To some pale, twitching sleeper in a bunk.
And here is courage, cheaply bought
To cure a blue sick funk,
And dearly paid for in the final sum.
Here in this powdered fly is caught
Desire more ravishing than Tarquin’s....
And at last
When the one weary hope is past
Here is the sole escape,
The little postern in the house of breath
Where pallid fugitives keep tryst with death.
All this the drug clerk knows and there he stands,
Young and dapper and debonair ...
293He rests a pair of slender hands,
Much manicured, upon the counter there
And speaks: “No, we don’t carry no pomade,
We only cater to the high-class trade.”