St Gabriels High School - Archangel Yearbook (Hazleton, PA)

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The TRUMPET --C i l- - Emily Dickinson: New England Authoress Morns like these we parted: Noohs like these she rose Flutteriug first, then firmer, To her fair repose. There has been a great deal of adverse criticism about Emily Dickinson-as, perhaps, is bound to be written about any artist whose achievement is revealed too early or too late. Nobody, at first encounter, can judge coolly of work that is not revealed until after the worker's death and which bursts then upon the world in a most amazing fashion. And then, nobody, at any time, can judge very coolly of a woman, whose claim upon the world's memory-a claim she herself so protestingly denied, is not merely for long hidden genius, but also the long hidden mystery and sorrow, the fulfillment and frustration of her quiet life. If she were not the supreme artist maintained by her enthusiasts, she remains one of the most arresting discoveries of recent literary decades. She had the incomparable gift of the fresh mind, to which every- thing that came at all, came at first hand-and the gift, too, of the greatly loving heart to whom the perennial price of loving was never too high. She came from a family dignfied and devoted, and intensely distrnstful of emotionalism. The Dickinsons were of good English descent, and settled at Hadley. Massachusetts, early enough to be mentioned in the Indian grants in 1659. Our poet's grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, was one of the founders of Amherst -Town, Church, and College. It was he who wrote to his son Edward, then a student at Yale, urging him to direct his attention to the moral and religious training of the school. Edward grew up with the equal high seriousness of his fatherg and when he was about to marry the shy, self-effacing, little Emily Norcross, he asked her to prepare for a life of rational happiness rather than a life of pleasure. Verily, the family tree is not always known by its fruitsg for from that edifying, but somewhat rigid union came the exquisite, unrestrained creature, half ecstasy, half inhibition, known as Emily Dickinson. The Amherst where she was born, 1830, was a center of reasonably high thinking and reasonably plain liv- ing. Her home was a genial one for New England, dtllmut far from gay. .Q .- As a matter of fact, nothing was spectacular about her childhoodg she did not even write, or, like the infantine Edgar Poe, recite poetry, but reveled in the sensuous beauty of God's earth. Quite literally she was standing upon the threshold of life up to the momentous year 1854. The preceding winter she had spent rather gayly in Washington, and when spring came, she decided to visit relatives in Philadelphia. There she learned that the only man she had ever loved was already a husband and a fatherg all too obviously it was one of those problems incapable of any human solution, since she was the last creature to stoop to the compromise of a divorce. She seemed to have felt both the sacramental possi- bility of love and the impossibility of achieving this through the destruction of other lives. The two went their separate ways-he to exile and an early death, she to the harder path of everyday duties of her hidden art: on this occasion she wrote: That I did always love, I bring thee proof, That till I loved I did not love enough. That I shall love al'ways,' I ofer thee That love is life, And life hath immortality. Gradually, then, the life of Emily Dickinson became that of an anchoress with a few rapturous windows in her little cell, one of which looked upon nature. During the last decade of her life, Emily never passed beyond the family grounds and her slight figure, always in white, stealing out to water the Howers at dusk became a legend through the countryside. Those hidden fiowers and still more jealousy hidden poems were the visible symbols of her life's dual paradox: its hunger for experience, for adventure, and its equally acute hunger for home. Neither one was satisfied during the earthly transit, since both the fiight and the rest of her heart met frustration. But one loves to believe that both came to her at last- when after two years of a partial paralysis, she died in the May of 1886. i821 in- --Q..

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The TRUMPET -'QI' 1 l i 1 Q.. determined to go? Yes , grunted Larry from the recess of a closet. But, man, be reasonable, you know she wants me , protested Guy. Why didn't she say so then? How could she and you standing there. Who invited you anyhow F You did. This from Larry who was now strug- gling with his shirt studs. Well if you're going to make a fool of yourself, I might as well do the same , declared Guy indignantly. NVhereupon he began to dress quickly. At length they came to the door at the same time and glared at each other. For an instant both felt the humor of the situation, and if either had smiled or said a friendly word, the matter, most likely, would have been settled, but neither did. VVhat might have devel- oped into lasting friendship, was turned into lifelong enmity. VVell I intend to take her, that's all , said Guy impatiently, with his hand on the knob. I do, too , insisted Moylan. Oh no, you don't! Don't you think so? I know that you're not. Don't be too sure, declared Larry defiantly. This so enraged Randolph that with no thought for this year during which Moylan had proved a loyal and true friend, and almost without realizing what he was doing. he struck a swift hard blow at Larry's face. If it had been expected Moylan could have defended himself but the blow came suddenly and he fell to the floor with a dull thud. Even then he could have risen and beaten Randolph, being much taller and heavier, hut his head struck a chair in falling and he lay stretched out on the carpet only half-conscious. Randolph calmly crossed to the mirror and smoothed down his disarranged hair, with the feeling that his outraged pride had been satisfied. He glanced down at the prostrate figure of his former friend. Too bad I had to beat him up, the poor fool , he reflected contemptuously, and turned towards the door. Here he was met by a messenger boy bearing a small white envelope. The young man tore it open eagerly and read: Tired of your squabbling. Have decided to go with Edmund. Charm. , NIARY R. lNfIcN1-znrmsv, '26. 6 6 ,fo IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIA uuunmn X Q f . ? - I8ll

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The TRUMPET Ql - - l l 1 1 Q Size 'went as quiet as Hn' dew From iz familiar flmevr. Not like the deze did slit- return At the fll'l'll.Y10lllI'd lminz' Love taught Emily Dickinson all she ever knew about life. Not the love accepted hy her people, hut the love which was a burning and consuming fire, quite literally consuming all that it could not trans- mnte into itself. In this sense it may be said that all her poems were love poems. She had called them her Letter to the World -wthe letter not deliverable until after the sender's death. And they tell us of her loves, of the world she looked out upon, and the God toward whom she reached. Artistically their value is uneven. She was at one moment as aphoristic as Emerson, at another, as adventurous as Edna Millay. It does not seem that Emily had a very wide familiarity with poetry: and her almost hysterical dread of puhlicity shut her ol? from the professional criticism which might have corrected her occasional faulty music and occasionally stilted or elliptical phrasing. She had, in fact, hoth the defects and the qualities of her isolation. And it is as hurtful to her fame as it would have been to her fugitive spirit to declare-in the words of one recent and fervid anthologist-that her work is perhaps the finest, by a woman, in the English language. For it is fair and obvious that she cannot stand comparison with Mrs. Browning in sustained emotion, nor with Mrs. Meynell in the exquisite chiseling of rarehed thought, nor with Louise Imogen Guiney Can almost contem- porary danghter of New Englandj in the sureness of her music or her message. And yet Emily Dickinson was a poet of skill and of passion and of essential originality, and there are a few of her more than six hundred brief lyrics which American literature could well afford to miss. In the essential matter of her poetry she needed no teaching from without. One lifting breath of ecstasy and her heart and fancy were off with her own chimes. In that relation she was close npon many secrets never quite revealed! Most of all, perhaps, was she like a tossed craft, thwarted of its earthly harbor. hut at the end, a symbol of proud, pathetic loveliness: Tim! .rurh Izmir' diva' enables us The franquillcr to die: That such hfrvz' lived, rerlifirnlr For inunortality. THoMAs A. SHERIDAN, '26, 45 Fr ,,J' t DIIIIIIIIIIIIILEH. nmumm 5 X f X Q -uQ i 3 l Qu I83l