Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Fire

Eunice Tietjens

LOVE, let us light

A fire tonight,

A wood fire on the hearth.

With torn and living tongues the flames leap.

Hungrily

They catch and lift, to beat their sudden wings

Toward freedom and the sky.

The hot wood sings

And crackles in a pungent ecstasy

That seems half pain of death, and half a vast

Triumphant exultation of release

That its slow life-time of lethargic peace

Should come to this wild rapture at the last.

We watch it idly, and our casual speech

Drops slowly into silence.

Something stirs and struggles in me,

Something out of reach

Of surface thoughts, a slow and formless thing—

Not I, but a dim memory

Born of the dead behind me. In my blood

The blind race turns, groping and faltering.

Desires

Only half glimpsed, not understood,

Stir me and shake me. Fires

Answer the fire, and vague shapes pass

Like shapes of wind across the grass.

The red flames catch and lift,

Roaring and sucking in a furious blaze;

And a strange, swift

Hunger for violence is in me. My blood pounds

With a dark memory of age-old days,

And mad red nights I never knew,

When the dead in me lived, and horrid sounds

Broke from their furry throats.

In drunken rounds,

Blood-crazed, they danced before the leaping flames,

While something twisted in the fire….

Now as the flames mount higher

Strange pictures pass. I cannot see them quite

And yet I feel them.
I am in a dread

Dark temple, and I beat my head

In maddened rite,

Before the red-hot belly of a god

Who eats his worshippers….
This is a funeral pyre

And one lies dead

Who was my life. The fat smoke curls and eddies,

Beckoning suttee….
But the moment slips

To Bacchanalian revels—quick hot lips

And leaping limbs, lit by the glare

Of human torches….

A sudden spark

Goes crackling upward, followed by a shower;

And I am in the hills, cool hills and dark,

Primeval as the fire. The beacon flare

Leaps in a roaring tower,

Spattering in sparks among the stars

Tales of wild wars.

And on a distant crest

Its mate makes answer….

But the embers gleam

Like molten metal steaming at a forge,

Where with rough jest

Great lusty fellows

Ply the roaring bellows,

And clang the song of labor—and the dream

Man builds in metal….

Now the red flame steadies.

Softly and quietly it burns,

Purring, and its embers wear

A friendly and domestic air.

This is the hearth-fire—home and peace at last.

Comfort and safety are attendant here.

The primal fear

Is shut away, to whistle in the blast

Beyond the doorway where the shadows twine.

The fire is safety, and the fire is home,

Light, warmth and food. Here careless children come

Filling the place with laughter;

And after

Men make good council-talk, and old men spin,

With that great quiet of the wise,

Tales of dead beauty, and of dying eyes.

The fire is drooping now. A log falls in

Softly upon itself, like one grown tired

With ecstasy. The lithe tongues sink

In ash and ember:

And something I remember

From ages gone—and yet I cannot think—

Some secret of the end,

Of earth grown old, and death turned friend,

And man who passes

Like flame, like light, like wind across the grasses.

Ah, what was that? A sudden terror sped

Behind me in the shadows. I am cold;

And I should like your hand to hold

Now that the fire is dead.

Love, light the lamp, and come away to bed.

Fire is a strange thing, burning in your head.