Holten High School - Onion Yearbook (Danvers, MA)

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12 T THE HOLTEN Harper's Ferry to Appamattoxg great men and small men. But Benet's purpose was not mere- ly to paint pictures. He was a poet whose duty it is to interpret the pic- tures that he has painted. He reveal- ed the heart of a runaway slave or the soul of a general with the insight of a poet. He wrote a book that was not a book but living men. He look- ed into men's souls and made them live again for us. Listen to his des- cription of the death of Stonewall Jackson: He lay on the bed After the arm had been lopped from him, grim and silent, Refusing importunate death with ter- rible eyes. Now and then He spoke, with the old curt justice that never once Denied himself or his foe or any other The rigid due they deserved, as he saw that due. IF Pk Pk PF 2 Pk H4 Dk PF The slow time wore. They had to tell him at last That he must die. The doctors were brave enough, No doubt, but they looked awhile at the man on the bed And summoned his wife to do it. So she told him. He would not believe at first. Then he lay awhile . Silent, while some slow, vast reversal of skies Went on in the dying brain. At last he spoke. All right , he said. She opened the Bible and read. It was spring outside the window, the air was warm, The rough, plank house was full enough of the spring. They had had a good life together, these two middle-aged Calm people, one reading aloud now, the other silent, They had passed hard schools. They were in love with each other And had been for many years. Now that tale was told. They had been poor and odd, found each other trusty, Begotten children, prayed, disliked to be parted, W Had family-j okes, known weather and other matters, Planned for an age ,they were famous now, he was dying. The clock moved on, the delirium be- gan. The watchers listened, trying to catch the words: Some awed, one broken-hearted, a few, no doubt, Not glad to be there precisely, but in a way Glad that, if it must happen, they could be there. It is a human emotion. The dying man Went back at first to his battles, as soldiers do. He was pushing a new advance With the old impatience and skill, over tangled ground, A cloudy drive that did not move as he willed Though he had it clear in his mind. They were slow today Tell A. P. Hill to push them-push the attack- Get up the guns. The cloudy assault dispersed. There were no more cannon. The ground was plain enough now. He lay silent, seeing it so, while the watchers listened. He had been dying once, but that was a dream. The ground was plain enough now. He roused himself and spoke in a dif- ferent voice. Let us cross the river, he said, and rest under the shade of the trees.

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THE HOLTEN I1 manityf' In his ideal he is far ahead of his times. This ideal, if followed as he believes in it, would solve the problem of world peace. For only when the individuals of all nations truthfully and soulfully live the doc- trine of non-violence, will war be a thing of the past. Whether Gandhi succeeds or fails politically, his moral influence upon the world will be great, for, in the words of Archibald Henderson, the greatest victories of life are not won on the battlefieldg the spoils are not always to the victor, nor to the con- queror always the palm and the crown. Gandhi has wrested his vic- tory from defeat, and the end of souls that have not known defeat is victory. Cecil Peterson. CLASS ESSAY You can weigh John Brown's Body well enough, But how and in what balance Weigh John Brown. A few years ago, somewhere in southern France, a young man was thinking of John Brown. The man was descended from a bold Mexican bandit with Spanish and Irish blood in his veins, and on this day he was dreaming of John Brown. Since he was a poet and had the romance of Spain in his heart, he quickly dis- carded John Brown's body from his mind and dreamed only of his soul. And of a sudden he told us in these lines what he imagined John Brown was: Sometimes there comes a crack in time itself, Sometimes an image that has stood so long It seems implanted as the polar star Is moved against an unfathomable force That suddenly will not have it any- more. Call it God or Fate, Call it Mansoul, That force exists and moves, And when it moves , It will employ a hard and actual stone To batter into bits an actual wall And change the actual scheme of things. John Brown Was such a stone-unreasoning as the stone Destructive as the stone, and, if you like, Heroic and devoted as such a stone. Around this image Stephen Vincent Benet wove his American Iliad, John Brown's Body. This unusual poem is a complete picture of every phase of America's life during the Civil War. Benet presents his story in short, separate sketches which, he weaves skillfully together to produce his whole pattern. First of all, we meet the young Connecticut Yankee, Jack Ellyat. We follow him into the army, as a battle fugitive, and as the lover of a girl in the Tenn- essee woods. In contrast to him is the proud, aristocratic southerner, Clay Wingate, loyal to his light-foot- ed sweetheart, Sally Dupre, and to the Black Horse Troop to which he belonged. These two stories are fol- lowed each one to its end. With these main tales, in brief flashes We see John Brown's seige, his trial, and his executiong we see Lincoln in the White House 3 Spade, a runaway slaveg the battles of the war, from

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THE HOLTEN 13 The author besides being a poet is wholly and undividedly American. As a representative of America in this modern era he has sought for indi- vidualism in style and thought. His style is unique, for the poem is writ- ten in blank verse, in free verse, in rhyme, and in prose. His poetry is rugged, clean cut, and vivid. The fact that he was the first ever to at- tempt an epic of America is proof enough of his individual daring-call it inconstancy, changeablness, or what you will. He attempted to catch the spark of Americanism and put it into his poem. In his Invocation, which is one of the finest examples of good verse today, he describes the genuine American literature and ex- presses the hope that he may capture the American Muse. That he realizes the greatness of his undertaking, the adverse criticism and the failure to appeal to another's imagination is stated in these lines: American muse, whose strong and diverse heart, So many men have tried to under- stand But only make it smaller with their art, Because you are as various as your land, As mountainous deep, as flowered with blue rivers, Thirsty with deserts, buried under snows, As native as the shape of Navajo quivers. And native, too, as the sea-voyaged rose. Swift runner, never captured or sub- dued, Seven-branched elk beside the moun- tain stream, That half a hundred hunters have pursued But never matched their bullets with the dream, Where the great huntsmen failed, I set my sorry And mortal snare for your immortal quarry. Yet, as we hunt you down, you must escape And we pursue a shadow of our own That can be caught in a magician's cape But has the flatness of a painted stone. Read casually with the mind of a realist the poem has the fiatness of a painted stone, but we can catch the inmost spirit of its substance in our magician's cape, our imagination. That underlying spirit is the spirit of John Brown. He was the stone hurl- ed from the Stone Mountain, War, which struck and slowly crumbled bit by bit the strong barrier of slavery. He started all the other stones in the mountain on their way and they struck the wall with even greater force. And as the war was fought, the slaves were freed, North and South were one again-yet what was Benet's conclusion? Has anything changed? Even though the wall was broken down, was it and all it signi- fied completely blotted out? No. The slaves of industry still remain: labor is the slave of capital: poverty is the slave of wealth: personal freedom is the slave of convention. John Brown, your spirit is here and well needs to be, for- Nothing is changed, John Brown, nothing is changed. l Caroline Butler.