  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. THE MOST-SACRED MOUNTAINSpace, 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. 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. |
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