Poem of the Week: 'A Plaint of Complexity' by Eunice Tietjens
Eunice Tietjens (1884 - 1944) was an American author who wrote poems, short stories, and children's books, among other things. She was a WWI correspondent and also worked as an editor. Some of her writing, specifically about Asia, contains typical of the time but nonetheless troubling and racist stereotypes and motifs. This poem, for me, shows an incredible insight into being a woman and being torn between different selves.
A Plaint of Complexity by Eunice Tietjens
I have too many selves to know the one.
In too complex a schooling was I bred,
Child of too many cities, who have gone
Down all bright cross-roads of the world's desires,
And at too many altars bowed my head
To light too many fires.
One polished self I have, she who can sit
Familiarly at tea with the marquise
And play the exquisite
In silken rustle lines with etiquette,
Chatting in French, Italian, what you please,
Of this and that...
Who sings now at La Scala, what's the gown
Fortuni's planned for "La Louise".
Or what Les Jeunes are at in London town.
She can look out
At dusk across Lung'Arno, sigh a bit
And speak with shadowy feeling of the rout
Of scorn for Guido Reni, just the "Ah!"
For the queezed martyrs of El Greco.
And I've a modern, rather mannish self
Lives gladly in Chicago
She believes
That woman should come down from off her shelf
Of calm dependence on the male
And labor for er living.
She likes men,
And equal comradeship, and giving
As much as she receives.
She likes discussions lasting half the night,
Lit up with wit and cigarettes,
Of art, religion, politics and sex,
Science and prostitution. She thinks art
Deals first of all with life, and likes to write
Poems of drug clerks and machinery.
She's very independent - and at heart
A little lonely...
I've a horrid self,
A sort of snob, who's travelled here and there
And drags in reference by the hair
To steamship lines, and hotels in Hong Kong,
The temple roofs of Nikko, and the song
Of the Pope's Nightingale.
She always speaks
In passing, of the great men whom she knows,
And leaves a trail
Of half impressed by irritated foes.
My other selves dislike her, but we can't
Get rid of her at certain times and places,
And there are faces
That wake her in me.
I've a self compounded of strange, wild things,
OF solitude, and mud, and savagery;
I've a self might almost be a nun,
So she loves peace, prim gardens in the sun
Where shadows shift at evening,
Hands at rest,
And the clear lack of questions in her breast.
And deeper yet is my mother self,
Something not so much I as womankind,
That surges upward from a blind
Immeasurable past.
A little laughing daughter, a cool child
Sudden and lovely as a wild
Young wood-thing, she has somehow caught
And holds half unbelieving. She has wrought
Love-bonds to hold her fast
Of courage, tenderness and truth,
And memories of her own, white youth,
The best I am, or can be.
The self stands
When others come and go, and in her hands
Are balm for wounds and quiet for distraction,
And she's the deepest source of all my actions.
But I've another self she does not touch,
A self I live in much, and overmuch
These latter years.
A self who stands apart from outward things,
From pleasure and from tears,
And all the little things I say and do.
She feels that action traps her, and she swings
Sheer out of life sometimes, and loses sense
Of boundaries and of impotence.
I think she touches something, and her eyes
Grope, almost seeing through the veil
Towards the eternal beauty in the skies
And the last loveliness that cannot fail.
But what she sees in her far spirit world,
Or what the center is
Of all this whirl of crowding I's,
I cannot tell you - only this:
That I've too many selves to know the one;
In too complex a schooling was I bred,
Child of too many cities, who have gone
Down all bright cross-roads of the world's desires,
And at too many altars bowed my head
To light too many fires.
Credit for the poem goes to Eunice Tietjens and is here reproduced from Chronicle Books' There Are Girls Like Lions.
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