Who wander also to and fro,
And know not why or where they go,
Yet have a wonder in their eyes,
Sometimes a pale and cold surprise.

Arturo Giovannitti

Arturo Giovannitti was born in Abruzzi, Italy, January 7, 1884. He studied at the college of his native province and came to New York when he was eighteen years old. Even as a child, Giovannitti had dreamed of America and had "learned upon the knees of his mother and father to reverence, with tears in his eyes, the name of the republic." With the dream of America as the great liberator in his heart, his first impressions were shattering. What he saw, through the eyes of the laborer, was the whiplash and legal trickery, the few ruling the many, the miseries and exploitation of the helpless. He thought of becoming a preacher, attended theological school; sought a greater outlet for his passion for democracy and became an editor; lectured, wrote pamphlets and worked continually to express "a multitude of men lost in an immensity of silence."

Although Giovannitti has written several books in Italian, his one English volume is Arrows in the Gale (1914). In an eloquent introduction to the poet's rough music and rougher mixture of realism and rapture, Helen Keller writes, "He makes us feel the presence of toilers behind tenement walls, behind the machinery they guide. . . . He finds voice for his message in the sighs, the dumb hopes, the agonies and thwartings of men who are bowed and broken by the monster hands of machines."

Several of Giovannitti's poems are in rhyme, but his most characteristic lines move in uplifted prose poems that shape themselves vividly to their subjects. "The Cage," with its

restrained anger, and "The Walker" are typical.

"The

Walker," unfortunately too long to quote in its entirety, is remarkable not only as an art-work but as a document; it is a twentieth-century "Ballad of Reading Gaol," with an intensity and mystical power of which Wilde was incapable.

FROM "THE WALKER "

I hear footsteps over my head all night.

They come and they go. Again they come and they go all night.

They come one eternity in four paces and they go one

eternity in four paces, and between the coming and the going there is Silence and the Night and the Infinite.

For infinite are the nine feet of a prison cell, and endless is the march of him who walks between the yellow brick wall and the red iron gate, thinking things that cannot be chained and cannot be locked, but that wander far away in the sunlit world, each in a wild pilgrimage after a destined goal.

Throughout the restless night I hear the footsteps over my head.

Who walks? I know not. It is the phantom of the jail, the sleepless brain, a man, the man, the Walker. One-two-three-four: four paces and the wall. One-two-three-four: four paces and the iron gate. He has measured his space, he has measured it accurately, scrupulously, minutely, as the hangman measures the rope and the gravedigger the coffin-so many feet,

so many inches, so many fractions of an inch for each

of the four paces. One-two-three-four. Each step sounds heavy and hollow

over my head, and the echo of each step sounds hollow within my head as I count them in suspense and in dread that once, perhaps, in the endless walk, there may be five steps instead of four between the yellow brick wall and the red iron gate.

But he has measured the space so accurately, so scrupulously, so minutely that nothing breaks the grave rhythm of the slow, fantastic march.

All through the night he walks and he thinks.

Is it more frightful because he walks and his footsteps sound hollow over my head, or because he thinks and speaks not his thoughts?

Four

But does he think? Why should he think? Do I think? I only hear the footsteps and count them. steps and the wall. Four steps and the gate. But beyond? Beyond? Where goes he beyond the gate

and the wall?

He goes not beyond. His thought breaks there on the
Perhaps it breaks like a wave of rage,

iron gate.
perhaps like a sudden flow of hope, but it always
returns to beat the wall like a billow of helplessness
and despair.

He walks to and fro within the narrow whirlpit of this ever storming and furious thought. Only one thought-constant, fixed, immovable, sinister, without power and without voice.

A thought of madness, frenzy, agony and despair, a hellbrewed thought, for it is a natural thought. All

things natural are things impossible while there are jails in the world-bread, work, happiness, peace, love.

But he thinks not of this. As he walks he thinks of the most superhuman, the most unattainable, the most impossible thing in the world:

He thinks of a small brass key that turns just half around and throws open the red iron gate.

Eunice Tietjens

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 MOUNTAIN

Space, 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.