Scripps College - La Semeuse Yearbook (Claremont, CA)

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The slow moon drihs, lonely globule, bright As beaten silver gleaming with thin light Behind a fretted pattern of dark towers. . . The bells of Magdaleii chant the drifting hours. Then comes the change. The ever-deepening air Shudders and strains to silence, poised upon The apex of' a darkness lingers there Une aching moment, trembles, and moves on Turning eastward. Darkness get thee gone! . Across far worlds rings dawn,s triumphal cry As myriad motes of light rush down the sky. May morning-and the cool dew-silvered grass Of Magdaleii meadows gleams beneath pale skies. The High Street echoes as gay voices pass To throng the stately bridge. Hushed are the cries. I-Iigh from the tower, hint and clear, rings one Sweet Pagan anthem to the rising sun. ANN HOPKINS From 'SO11 Readin 'A o Forever' H g Y BETTY LOU SNIDER IT HAS always distressed me to see two hundred dollars, or more, spent for a coffin that can do no earthly good. Least of all will it help the corpse that is buried within. A thousand dollar tombstone is inexpensive as tombstones gog and yet admiring hordes do not troop to graveyards, here I think Mr. Ruskin would agree with me, to gaze upon slabs of granite and marble that are joys forever. It would be of greater benefit, and show more respect for the intelligence of the clear departed one, to spend the large sum of money, commonly used to cover the 22

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Coiled at the swampy bottom of the jungle land was a brown tree-boa. I-le was drowsy. I-lis meal had been a little too heavy. From ml-he Third Deirdren Aomsss COOK T H IS enchantment was, of course, the culmination of the old legend. Stephens puts it in as matter-of-Eictly as if anybody could step up and get enchanted for the small sum of five pen- nies deposited in the slot machine. Having spread his enchan- terls net, he goes on to one of the most beautiful bits of heroic writing I have ever read: the death of the sons of Uisneac .... In the plays, Deirdre is allowed a great death-scene. This is how Stephens does it: 'KDeirdre knelt by the bodies, and she sang this keen, beginning: U 'I send a blessing eastward to Scotland' gKWl1CH she had finished the poem she bowed over her hus- band,s body: she sipped of his blood, and she died there upon his body. No man can love her, no man can bend before her, no man can speak to her, no man can be a friend to her. That is what he lamentsg what more could any woman want of a poet than those services he mentions. Aier all, the most human of all cries of mourning over the dead is not the funeral eulogy, but the griefstricken lament, Noxv that she is gone, I cannot do the things for her that I might have done. May Mo rning-Oxford D A W N comes more slowly in the early spring. Through the long slumber of profoundest night Witli the oblivion of a forgotten thing 2.1

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cost of a decent burial, for a Worthy cause. The amount neces- sary for any really good funeral would send any deserving young person through college. I was Ruskin's disciple long before I knew it. From Marcel Proust, a Stud in Decadencen Y DAPPIINIE FRASER P R OUST l S total omission of the moral will ftom his reckon- ings, then, and his assumption that man's nature is a series of movements and not a concentric pattern lie at the root of his decadence. Similar ideas have been devastatingly current since the begin- ning of the century. The old Gish in the social orders has gone, and nothing has come to replace it. The old standards have gone, and the old controls. The idea of a sentiment in an in- dividual With which his acts will be consistent has gone, re- placed by the gloomy tenets of naturalism. Faith in God has gone, along wich Raith in oneself: Futility reigns. Proust's success in being the spokesman of a decadent age, in interpreting its weariness, its lack of selflconfidence, is undeni- able.. His characters are amazingly true, although they lack a central spring. I-lis artistic sincerity is passionate, although his message is disillusionment. His failure is the failure of a great writer who accepts his age and interprets it, but fails to transcend it. We cannot forgive his Eiilure, because his very devotion to art is in contradiction to his thesis of fiitility. And our admiration for the perfection of his study of a decadent generation must not hide ftom us the Elct that he immersed himself in its current, and never rose above it. 23