| Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 1912–22. | | | | The Bookshop | | By Amy Lowell |
| | | PIERROT had grown old. | |
| He wore spectacles | |
| And kept a shop. | |
| Opium and hellebore | |
| He sold | 5 |
| Between the covers of books, | |
| And perfumes distilled from the veins of old ivory, | |
| And poisons drawn from lotus seeds one hundred years withered | |
| And thinned to the translucence of alabaster. | |
| He sang a pale song of repeated cadenzas | 10 |
| In a voice cold as flutes | |
| And shrill as desiccated violins | |
| |
| I stood before the shop, | |
| Fingering the comfortable vellum of an ancient volume, | |
| Turning over its leaves, | 15 |
| And the dead moon looked over my shoulder | |
| And fell with a green smoothness upon the page. | |
| I read: | |
| “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have none other gods but me.” | |
| |
| Through the door came a chuckle of laughter | 20 |
| Like the tapping of unstrung kettledrums, | |
| For Pierrot has ceased singing for a moment | |
| To watch me reading. | | | | |
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