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

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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.

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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.

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SIGILLUM Or the streaked and ruddy henna dyeing deep the once-green wood, And the lazy haze of autumn, and the deer at licks at Sundown, And the full and swelling orchards, heavy trees with fecund offering To the goddess of the harvest, and the crunch of fallen leaves, All in russet, scarlet autumn, all in tawny, yellow autumn, all in wine-soaked, glowing autumn, In a dead and dying blanket, rustling crisply under foot. Or the wilderness of whiteness-a small cabin bound by snow, Radiant fields with sunlight glistening, and a crowded mackerel sky, And a sawing wind cutting lightly the length of the lake, And drab trees that naked shiver, beside tall and blue-green pine, And the blood-red wound of the setting sun, soon to be healed by night, And a choked and desperate freshet gushing from out its tiara of ice, Or within doors fires cracking, or of hard birch logs, red embers, Dying embers forming fantasies one might conceive As little Indian villages and a great, gilt Hobbomocko ' stalking the streets, And then waffles on the griddle,and the smell of fried hung bacon Soon the cabin hushed in night. Yes, Connecticut has this feeling: White Georgian churches, passionate spires, austerely crying to God, Proportions good and just and true, restraint that sings of stern Hint souls, That speaks of fire, plainly prints conviction in the Green. That dates of seventeen-sixty-one and seventeen-sixty-two, That stare from placards over doors, evoke a thousand memories . . . Of pewter-like and burnished souls. I Quem virum aut heroa lyra vel acri Tibia sumis celebrare, Clio? -HORACE Put the history books down and seek out the towns Where all these things took place . . . let memory suffuse With the present's face the distant shades of the past. O Connecticut valley, Triumphantly telling of your rich resources, your bounty so endless, your wholeness and oneness, How great is your land! O valley and hills, Then so studded with maples, and oak trees and chestnuts, and walnuts, and cedars, and pine, - The Evil Spirit ofthe Indians.