The Project Gutenberg eBook, Profiles from China, by Eunice Tietjens

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Title: Profiles from China

Author: Eunice Tietjens

Release Date: August 5, 2004 [eBook #13118]
Most recently updated: January 4, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROFILES FROM CHINA***

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PROFILES FROM CHINA

Sketches in Free Verse of People and Things Seen in the Interior

by

EUNICE TIETJENS

1917

To My Mother

CONTENTS

PROEM
The Hand

FROM THE INTERIOR
Cormorants
A Scholar
The Story Teller
The Well
The Abandoned God
The Bridge
The Shop
My Servant
The Feast
The Beggar
Interlude
The City Wall
Woman
Our Chinese Acquaintance
The Spirit Wall
The Most-Sacred Mountain
The Dandy
New China: The Iron Works
Spring
Meditation
Chinese New Year

ECHOES
Crepuscule
Festival of the Dragon Boats
Kang Yi
Poetics
A Lament of Scarlet Cloud
The Son of Heaven
The Dream
Feng-Shui

CHINA OF THE TOURISTS
Reflections in a Ricksha
The Camels
The Connoisseur: An American
Sunday in the British Empire: Hong Kong
On the Canton River Boat
The Altar of Heaven
The Chair Ride
The Sikh Policeman: a British Subject
The Lady of Easy Virtue: an American
In the Mixed Court: Shanghai

Proem

Profiles
from
China

The Hand

As you sit so, in the firelight, your hand is the color of
new bronze.
I cannot take my eyes from your hand;
In it, as in a microcosm, the vast and shadowy Orient
is made visible.
Who shall read me your hand?

You are a large man, yet it is small and narrow, like the
hand of a woman and the paw of a chimpanzee.
It is supple and boneless as the hands wrought in pigment
by a fashionable portrait painter. The tapering
fingers bend backward.
Between them burns a scented cigarette. You poise it
with infinite daintiness, like a woman under the
eyes of her lover. The long line of your curved
nail is fastidiousness made flesh.

Ve