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

Page 87 text:

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

Page 86 text:

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..

Page 88 text:

The TRUMPET i Q- Ecstacy Translated from the French of Victor Hugo I was alone beside the sea, upon a starry night, And not a cloud was in the sky, and not a sail in sight. Beyond the limits of the world far stretched my raptured eye, And the forests, and the mountains, and nat-ure all around, Seemed to unite in questioning in vast and mingled sound The billows of the ocean, and the splendour of the sky. And the golden stars of heaven, in their unnumbered crowd, With harmonies ten thousand, with voices clear and loud, Rcplied, as low they beaded down their radiant crowns of flame,- And the blue floods, that naught has power to govern or arrest, Replied, as low they bended down, the foam upon their crest: It is the Lord, it is the Lord our God! ANNA MCELWEE, '28. Jubilee Indulgence With a deep sense of genuine pleasure we have learned that our Holy Father, Pope Pius, XI, has graciously deigned to extend to the Universal Church, the jubilee which was celebrated last year in Rome. In the official expression of his paternal purpose in this regard the Supreme Pontiff has defined the general conditions to be verified and the specific works to be performed by those who wish to gain the extraordinary blessings of the Jubilee. The prescribed spiritual works are confession and communion and particular visits to officially designated churches. The Jubilee Indulgence may be gained by all the faithful, including those who have made the Pilgrimage to Rome for this purpose. The Jubilee Indulgence may be obtained twice. On the first Occasion one may apply the Indulgence either for oneself or for the souls in Purgatoryg the second time it may be applied only to the souls in Purgatory. For people residing where there are three or four churches, the oldest church in years and any other three must be vis- ited for five consecutive or interrupted days. If there is only one church in the parish then the four visits must be made for live consecutive or interrupted days. The members of a Religious Community secular or regular whether priests, seminarians, nuns, sisters, novices or postulants, and those who live in a Religious house or con- vent may gain the jubilee Indulgence by making four visits each day to their chapel for the re- quired number of days. The visits to the churches should be made with devotion and prayers should be said for the intention of the Holy Father, which is for the propagation of the Catholic Faith, peace and con- cord amongst the nations, and such an arrange- ment regarding the Holy Places in Palestine as would harmonize with the rights of the Catholic Church. Those unable to make the required number of visits such as the sick and those who care for them, prisoners and those over seventy years of ageg those whose church is a mission which is opened only for a short time on Sunday, and those who live a great distance from a church may gain the Indulgence by fulfilling a work prescribed by their Pastor or Confessor. The announcement of the Jubilee Indulgence and the explanation of its spiritual blessing should readily induce the Catholic people to take instant and proper advantage of this most won- derful and very unusual opportunity to contri- bute to their own sanctification and to promote the realization of the sublime purposes expressed by the intention of our Supreme Pontiif. CATHERINE M. BURKE, '26, -0410 q in--I k i H0- l84l