Eunice Tietjens was born Eunice Strong Hammond in 1884 in Chicago. Considered instrumental to the Chicago Renaissance, she was a poet, a novelist, and an editor. The daughter of an artist trained in Europe, Tietjens was educated in European schools and traveled extensively in Asia throughout her life. During World War I, she worked as the Chicago Daily News correspondent in France and served as an associate editor for Poetry for 25 years under editor-in-chief Harriet Monroe. During her time in Chicago, Tietjens developed close friendships with the poets Edgar Lee Masters and Sara Teasdale. Eunice died in 1944.
TO JAKE
Eunice Tietjens
You are turned wraith. Your supple, flitting hands,
As formless as the night wind’s moan,
Beckon across the years, and your heart’s pain
Fades surely as a stainèd stone.
And yet you will not let me rest, crying
And calling down the night to me
A thing that when your body moved and glowed,
Living, you could not make me see.
Lean down your homely, mist-encircled head
Close, close above my human ear,
And tell me what of pain among the dead—
Tell me, and I will try to hear.