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

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.

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 52 text:

Connecticut Dreams The Initials P. W. S. during the years I93O-IQ34 were familiar ones to all readers of Chicago Latin publications. As founder of the News and editor of the Folio for two years, Philip W. Seipp showed real talent. His was a creative energy which encompassed all Latin activities. His was a spirit which held high the ideals of truth and beauty. The following are extracts from a long work written only two weeks before his tragic death during the spring of his Freshman year at Yale. After months of research, Connecticut Dream: was written, a tribute to that state's historical roots. Prelude And always America is the place of the deathless and enraptured moments, the eye that looked, the mouth that smiled and vanished, and the word, the stone, the leaf, the door we never found and never have forgotten -THOMAS WOLFE Connecticut has these places: High-terraced gardens with hollyhocks-stiff, fragrant lilac charms, And pleasant fields that yield a view of crystal lakes, And vaulted lanes of maple trees bound by low stone walls, Tall wooded hills where one greets night beyond a twilight sky, Small country roads that wind and twist their rutted way, And where roads cross, a general store, a hitching post, a well sweep tall, Rust-colored blacksmith shops, a white, Ionian town hall, and gardens High with hollyhocks. No less it has these moods: The calm hush of summer rainfall-the soft symphony of rain, And the gossamer webs of spiders, heavy, lacy, with the dew, And the slender blades of grass, gracefully bending, irridescentg And the soft rain on one's cheek, cool and yielding, smooth and sweet, And the startled call of starlings-with damp wings, a frightened flutter, All the while the eddying, ebbing diapason of the rain. Or the midsummer night's dream of a vaporous mist, gliding low oier a lake, And the croaking of frogs in a pond, The sound of night bathers, a canoe cutting water . . . the Swish of a deft j-stroke, Or a clean new moon in a cloudless sky, or Hesperus high and bright. Or the furious gale of a three-day northeaster in from the coast, The savage beat of the hard-pelting rain, and the cold, bitter damp- ness suffused with the wind.