Youth has its delights, its dreams; should it not have the fun of piping, even though it be through a willow whistle?
Ada L. F. Snell
Writing at college! How do they ever do it? Yet every year certain students achieve this juggling miracle, carrying on what is most easily a hermit occupation in parallel with their college life and work.
Some of them even have energy enough left over to 'organize.' The Mount Holyoke Magazine was founded in the spring of 1891 and is one of the oldest college magazines in the country, as it has appeared uninterruptedly for forty-five years. In the class of 1902 a group of six students called themselves the 'L. N. S. S.,' Lake Nonatuck School of Scribblers, and brought out a small book of verse which heralded many books and articles later published by various members of the group. The present-day society of those who write was started by some brisk souls in the class of 1909. They named the club 'Blackstick' after the Fairy Blackstick who keeps swooping down with ideas of her own in Thackeray's Rose and the Ring. Blackstick's emblem was a fountain pen, later changed to a quill, and its patron saint was Mrs. Hoppy,' Margaret Sutton Briscoe Hopkins, who year after year used to come flying down from Amherst to meet with Blackstick when earnestly invoked.
Other informal groups of expressive students have adorned the records - some of them out for writing, some of them out for reform, but using their pens either way. There was the Sophocles Authors Club (Frances Perkins was a member) and the Green Lamp and the Red Rag, and the S.C.M. (So-Called Minority), and the Challenge editors, and a group of beings who were mainly out to use the letter 'K' whenever they found it konvenient. Their maskot was a Kanonikal Kampus Kanine, their watchwod 'Kave Kanis Kampusi,' and their patron saint Kristopher Morley, who signed himself their 'Honorary Kinsprit.'
Some members of these crowds wrote, and some of them were the inspiration for the vituperative writing of others; but all of them had a feeling for sport with words. From these groups were drawn most of the editors for the College magazine and newspaper; and some of them wrote verse, either as a recognized club activity, as in the present-day Poetry Club, or as individuals, as among the Kinsprits.
Much of the best writing, however, has been done for the actual writing courses, largely because of the training, and partly because there is nothing like a date-line for getting writing done. A student who would feel self-conscious about camping down in the middle of a busy day to write a piece or a poem will go at it with almost professional desperation when a time for it is set in a course.
Because verse is quotable in short compass, and because through college verse one looks at what the students themselves are seeing as through the 'finder' of a camera, I have chosen some poems by recent students of the twenties and thirties, and have arranged them, not chronologically, but so as to bring out a certain play of moods. Most of them were written for two of the College courses, and all those dated in the twenties are reprinted from Mount Holyoke College Versewith permission of the eidtor, Professor Ada L. F. Snell, and the Oxford University Press. Others are from recent issues of the Colleg emagazine. I have asked the printer to allow a page for each poem, and I am hereby begging the reader to read the poems int he order given.
The first one, 'To a Bat,' startles observation awake with a serve like a bat's flight in the last lines. Next come poems essentially of college - 'History,' 'Seventeen' watching a boat-race between two Varsity crews, 'Philosophy' over nine turtles, and 'Disillusion' like cold hands after getting water at the spring. Then there is a group of interpretations, including thoughts when looking through a microscope in the Zoological Laboratory, thoughts on chaos and old age, and a young girl's memory of her mother. In the last group is a poem 'To an Indian Lover' by an Indian girl, and a series of college moods with one poem by a Japanese girl watching the singing 'Robins of South Hadley.'
But first, lights out for the poem 'To a Bat.'
Two fiery slits for eyes
Foreboding beams
That shift my puse to loud
Staccato beats -
What mystic power is this
In one who seems
Only a mouse dressed in
Accordian pleats?
Eleanor Clough, 1937
If, by the number of pebbles in the hand,
Men say, 'This was the path of the perpetual snows;
A glacier moved
Ten inches every day, and here it broke';
If, by discovering an ancient jaw,
A thighbone, and some pitiful back teeth
Hugged by the earth,
Men say, 'Three thousand years ago he lived,
And he was five feet seven inches tall';
And if, by unearthing eighty-eight bright fragments
From a rubbish heap, at an excavated fane,
Men say, 'Lugal-Zag-Gisa sent
One hundred vases, an offering to this place,
And from the Mediterranean to the Gulf
Was his domain';
Why can I not decippher present you,
And know you? - all beyond analysis,
Timeless and nameless you! -
How strange you are.
Even your hand is my bewilderment.
Roberta Teale Swartz, 1925
Gray afternoon of rain and will-green
And all the sweetness of the naked spring
Caught in a robin's throat.
Rain on the lake.
Three arrowy shells shoot through the mist.
The wet air trembles with the din of oars
And shouting megaphones.
Standing alone
She peeps between the dropping willow boughs
Watching for one among the bending backs.
She whips the weed-tops with a hazel switch,
Sighing to think that life should prove so dark;
And that one heart should bear such loneliness.
Janet Wicks, 1936
Nine turtles on a log are fortunate
To know their earthly lot predestinate;
In order true, secure in three times three,
A part of universal harmony.
Each stirs the softer humours of his mind,
By the sun's gentle influence inclined,
While no reality is immanent,
To contemplate his other element.
Frances Tatnall, 1926
My hands, too big for pockets from the cold,
Are curled, fingertip deep, leaving the thumb
Of each snuggled for shelter in a fold
Of sweater, now that washing's made them numb.
The plunge into a frozen moonlit spring
Has iced them into hands no longer quick
At dipping pails, or nailed anything,
Or whittling a door-stop from a stick.
I should not want to have myself tonight
For bedfellow - such hands would frost the sheet
And pillowcase, and chill the candlelight
Before we'd finished tucking up our feet.
I had not known, till now, my hands could be
So insupportable a part of me!
Florence Dunbar, 1936
A drop of water, and a microscope,
A dirty brown speck on a square of glass -
I borrow eyes - O world within a drop!
A nameless organism twists and moves
Struggling to make way, and back and forth
Writhing, gains - the hundredth of an inch?
Beset by fears it shrinks, recoils again
And goes on groping, agonizing there.
Always the finite struggles on, and twists
Upon itself, and tries to spiral out
To gain a way, and finds a fear, recoils,
And tries a new way, gains a fractional inch;
O world within a drop - O world without!
Elizabeth Whitney, 1926
I would be a symmetry
As the hills, and the sky;
I would have their ordered peace
As Time drifts by.
I would have the solemn calm
Their pattern brings;
I would have dignified design
In the welter of things.
Mary Russell, 1927
If I were sixty or ninety or so,
I shouldn't be caring where people go.
I shouldn't be cursing
The moon in the water
And the tall tuxedoes
And the trailing laughter,
Or brushing my hair
To a fine fierce cloud,
And taking up Shelley
And reading aloud . . .
I'd smile on my daughter's
Restless daughter.
I'd tell her, 'It's pretty,
The moon in the water.'
I'd know I was ninety
And in from the cold . . .
Now it's a long while
Till I am old!
Sara Allen, 1937
I am as poor as a tree,
My possessions are little to see;
But my penniless state, I am glad to relate,
Is highly delightful to me.
It troubles me little enough,
For my roots are voracious and tough,
And my branches and twigs have birds' nests for wigs
Compounded of intricate stuff.
My clothes are like leaves in a way;
Their origin no one can say.
But twice every year they blithely appear,
So I let them appear as they may.
I feed upon water and air
And I wave when the weather is fair.
So with light-headed ease I can live as I please -
Prosperity must be a care.
Mary Allen Edge, 1925
They think I'm praying but I'm not.
It is the reverent way I've got;
I bow my head so humbly, and
Sink my hot forehead in my hand.
I know that God is in this place,
But shall I hail Him face to face?
And shall I to Infinity
And to the Almighty, cry, 'Hear me!'
I should not stop a train with hails
When I came crashing down the rails,
And so I swagger even less
To flag the Infinite Express
Whose wheels spit out a thousand stars;
Thunder's the rattle of its cars;
The clicker-clacker of its gears
Shakes all the worlds in all the spheres.
Shall I kneel down to It in prayer -
'Don't run over me! Spare me! Spare!'
Anita Don, 1924
I know what God has given you to do,
Now that you cannot care for us longer, Maman -
That is, if he knows you as we have known you,
Your deep, deep love which could not be drained,
Your smile,
And the lightness of your hands.
He has homed you in the South,
And every spring
You will bring green silken leaves north
In transparent wrappings of winds
To dress the small aspens,
And will shoo the birds north with a flap of your apron,
Laughing;
You will untie the little stamping fretting brooks,
And let them skip down the valleys.
I think that you will catch the tired leaves,
When they fall after a while, hopeless -
Receive the cold birds into your breast,
And whisper your gentle old phrases
To the earth, facing the dark.
Then, please, Maman,
Ask the good Father
To make me a bird
Sleeping on your shoulder
Through the night.
Marjorie Cook, 1923
So slight a thing may seem
The way you stand;
And yet it marks the difference
Between yourself and me.
Only an Indian whose heritage
Is older than the Painted Desert or the peaks
Of Kish-li-pi could stand
So straight, so still, so staring into nothingness.
Thus have I seen great Kish-li-pi
Standing in the gloom
Of a darkening hour,
Remote, immovable,
Too far away for me to follow. -
O I would fly to you and tear
Those folded arms apart!
Would fire those calm, far-seeing eyes
And feel your sad, contemplative lips
Grow fervent -
Yesterday, laughing from the wind,
I came upon you,
Found you standing thus
And turned away with sobs instead of laughter.
O Love, where is it
That I cannot follow?
Ruth Muskrat, 1925
Why do you sing so, Robin,
When the sun is going down?
Are you calling the day back again
That you sing so intent,
Face toward the west,
Bending the topmost bough of a tree
Where the last rays still redly falling
Brighten your russet breast to a deeper hue?
Robin, you still sing
After the sunset clouds have faded,
And the purple mist encircling
Wets your wings with heavy dew.
Robin, your song breaks the heart of a hearer
Who also lingers in the dusk of March
Dreaming things that lie beyond his power.
Fumiko Mitani, 1926
Lonely cells are best for concentration, they say.
I have labored in isolation at my desk all day.
But shuffling footsteps delight me below on the street,
I rejoice in noisy voices around my retreat.
I'm tired. Don't speak to me if you will;
I'm not quite asleep, but let me lie still.
Yet rattle your papers occasionally that I may hear,
And feel your busy energies, know you are near.
Bring your mending and sit by my head -
Lean against my tombstone, when I am dead.
Caroline Keeler, 1928
'I gave him up in winter
Through cold reason,
But love has come back
With change of season.
The roads were in ruts,
Gray sleet was driving,
I froze up my heart
While my head was contriving.
First touch of sun
Soothed down the road,
Quickened the birch tree
Thawed out my blood.
We'll never walk
In sun or sleet together;
He has no use
For a girl ruled by weather.'
Phyllis Merrill, 1930
Face pressed to the cleanness of grass, and arms
Stretched to the clover, I lie, the lover
Of earth. There are none who have spoken
Words so sweet or queerly close as the smell
Of the soil; flesh never yielded to flesh
As mine to this hill-slope stretching always
Expectant and warm. My body curves
Till it fits to the curves of the hollows,
And now the intimate touch of the ground
Is peace for my restless limbs. Near my cheek
A wind-stirred weed drowsily sways, and I
Tremble, as at the touch of a shy
Loved hand. Beneath me the earth moves slowly,
And I cling more closely, eased of desire.
What more should I ask of death than to lie
Held to earth's heart, until I at the last
Am waving grass, and soil, and June clover?
Kathryn Irene Glascock, 1922
And here is a fragment of a poem of this present centennial springtime by Mary Elizabeth Gerhard - in laboratory again, hearing the
...campus chime
Tolling off quarter hours.
Outside the sky is blue,
The May morning clear and fair
Fragrant with new grass and flowers
And damp sod.
And my heart sings, 'Oh God,
Stop time,
Stop the spring,
Stop everything till I get there,
I'm almost through.'
But the robin continues to sing
From the tree top.
Nothing will stop;
The clock chimes on,
And I think, 'How swiftly flies the spring,'
And I think, 'My own life has hardly begun,
And yet it is one-third gone.'
Spring was like this a hundred years ago -
Yes, spring was like this a hundred years ago, and fifty years ago, and twenty-five years ago, and a year ago. 'Stop the spring - Stop everything till I get there, I'm almost through.'
These poems, each within the age-experience of the nineteens and twenties of the individual writers, are accurate also for placing in the nineteens and twenties of the centuries. Yet each has an idea that is not limited to youth or to a moment. The 'mouse dressed in accordian pleats' is a modern Hallowe'en masquerade of the spooky and the witty, yet the old startling power of the bat's flight is there in the early lines of the poem. An eighteenth-century lady would have written about a bat with a difference if she had written about a bat at all, but she would have felt much the same. The difference is that the modern girl's poem not only invokes an emotion but copes with it.
Similarly in the oblique little poem called 'A Confidence.' A girl who has refused a man in winter only to change her mind in spring is a good universal sort of theme, but it is handled here with due caution, one step removed, and with a realism and light restraint that leave the reader to do all the meditating:
We'll never walk
In sun or sleet together;
He has no use
For a girl ruled by weather.
An old gentleman of rich and varied experience remarked after he read those lines, 'Oh, well, that young man has no use for girls then.'
The poem that begins, 'If I were sixty or ninety or so' gets all the way on youth's idea of the width encompassed by the old-age zone, yet hits it off with a lightness that jumps the span between the two ends of life without any attempt to bridge it artificially.
And so of love for earth and the cleanness of grass and clover -
...There are none who have spoken
Words so sweet or queerly close as the smell
Of the soil . . .
by one whose young verse is doubly poignant because the serious note could on occasion be balanced by a sharp little vignette like this:
You called so gaily -
How could I know that you
Did not desire another voice
To answer joyously?
How could I know that you only
Listened for the echo
Of your own?
These things, all of them - chaos and microscopes and turtles and disappointment and grass and clover, and 'hands too big for pockets with the cold,' and trees 'with birds' nests for wigs,' and a robin at sunset and robins outside the laboratory window on a May campus - we have seen once and see again from a distance in full color years later, through the telephoto medium of College Verse.