Latin School of Chicago - Sigillum Yearbook (Chicago, IL)

Page 50 text:

SIGILLUM Against what fate concedes without my will. 4'Yes, I, intense on chaste and heartborn wings, Shall seek the words of my escape through night. O tiny god, the god of this lean town, Create my ecstacy: unshuttered Suns! CThe night is sad, in spheres of ashen ringsj But thou art dead, the 'cello surely sings. Song at the Well I Against the painted hill The copper beech is like you when Deep-planted near the mill Pond through the earth, it long resists The winds and rains, as men Are rooted, sun-strong lists Held in by ropes, full hearts pulsating, Caged by nightingales, But caught in nothing solid, hating All attenuated chains, All thin and ghostly bands. II The earthly impulse binds the field, And hard wrists growing, Wild, enchanted, yield Earth-weakness, slowing All the tenuated shadows of a dream. Not this is sad, O you who bring uplifting force. I tell You listening in quiet-bruited sorrow that the well Of misfortune here lies, Nor but alone in unreaped grain Nor in the closed-heart rain, Nor in west-blown and dust-flaked winds That cringe away with hate, With hot lists past retreating, Effortless because of arms and minds above, Not there but in our deafness to unspoken things. I say: with love Of heaven, the sainted well will be all full, And liquid-cool, Like moons on sun-hurt roofs.

Page 49 text:

lost Mementns In A Glass Case ARTHUR CUMMINGS Arthur Cummings, '36, Yale ,4O, a recent outstanding student Dust unblown and finely molded masks Are under glass like pauses in the flight Of time and dark and Sun, that gold-pronged loom That spins a cage of light around the World. I look upon the careful dome of glass So like a bubble blown, absorbing all Reflections of today Within the top. And dust in thin and like a templed eyelid, Rendering a songless mystery Upon the case and thus upon my lips. Cerebral dreams remind me of that lady Strangely not forgotten nor remembered,- Dreams like parchment stretched upon a globe Distorted Qaccidentally, it seemsj. With fading breath I feel the sullen fragrance Of the silk-hung air as echoing, A hallowed but nought-soothing anodyne. And faintly ballet-dancers' Whorls of white Revolve in chinese pattern, 'cellos sing So faintly that the smoke-gold light of day Seems not another sense-perception,--no, But rather sound cornmingled with that clean Abstraction of tree-shadows on the blinds. We live and are not hurt for this, the living, Yet we sigh for something lost to night Unrealized in its eternity. And so We cherish all poetic baubles Like those charms and bright-brocaded slippers. Have you age? The golden century-clock Would only see the clouds and sightless suns, And neither vaulted fields not steepled orchards Would respond in acquiescence now. How can you live? Nothing to say have I, Twice-questioned, nor to tell my soul, but this,

Page 51 text:

SIGILLUM III Seared by a hot-white devilface The street was empty, And the Indian spirit, Gone forsaken and far-wandered Deigned to touch with healing fingers not at all. Cloud-lace is coarsely cut in hemp, T-squared In stratus forms. Like claret Held to candles . . . sunset laundered fresh of clouds And kneeling trees drop down Their brushes to the wall And apple-trees of fruit Line hillocked lane That finds the shell-like town, The villagers escaped with loot,- With loss, and gain. Top-soil upturned, And crop-abused earth below, The scare-crow houses are far-flown and Hung in dust, the slow And sombre lessons to be learned. And cries the crow, The townsmen's nightingale is dead. Yes, I called out life And the streets were empty of answer. This gaudy smile Is empty of inward gleaning, Eyeless for the moonlit-ridge on Farm lands with the night sky Patterned by the pigeon In its white-cleft flight. And it can realize But nothings of death and preeXistence,- Papered eyes, Unfocused, lacking distance. IV This full emotion sways My comprehension of the earth, The clover, wheat, and maize. The loam has thirst unslaking, Though striped barns are splotched with rains. My heart renewed with blood is breaking All thin and ghostly bands, And all attentuated chains.