United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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THE POETRY CONTEST This year’s poetry contest is disappointing. On the whole verse makers avoided the insipidity of smoothly turned conventional verse. But in most cases they failed to justify the attempt at freedom. Only one piece exhibited significance or distinction in either matter or manner. This may have been due to the nature of the contest. It might be wiser to define the re¬ quirements—to ask for humorous verses, for heroic couplets, for sonnets, or for poems on a specific theme. Contestants this year seemed to lack both direction and energy and there was little proof of labour performed under the discipline imposed by a sense of craftsmanship. Poetry is the intense expression of vital experience whatever else it may be. The ex¬ perience is surely among our students. Competent expression in the poetic medium seems yet to seek. An annual contest such as this may justify itself if it serves to reveal this latter fact and stimulate a desire to challenge it. The contestants may discuss the matter over a cup of tea. The awards are as follows: 1. To a Poet. 2. As Loved our Fathers. 3. Evening at Basswood Lake. Reported for the Department of English, —A. L. P. TO A POET Why do you sing still of solitude, And quiet places, Of woody slopes, a turbulent rill, Blue skies and seas, the robin’s trill, When all that I see is a multitude Of human faces? Here is the place where I must live My span of life. Is all the comfort that you can give Flee from this strife? Is there not beauty in crowds of men Of streets, of houses, and chimney stacks? Is this not a virgin forest too with Mobile vigour that Nature lacks: Then why do you leave me thus and stand Futile, alone. In the midst of green sand And sterile stone, Hymning the dead on the edge of the Promised land. —M. D. Gilchrist, ’37. 1131

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built an ephemeral reputation by interpreting the rigmarole as “thinking raised to a more than ordinary intensity,” and society at large has disposed of the whole affair as a comparatively innocuous manifestation of that curious lunacy under which the world is furi¬ ously arming itself against its imminent suicide. I shall not bore you now by discussing Mr. Mencken’s little the¬ ory that modem art is simply the pastime of the spiritually decadent and the “intellectually immature,” but it does seem to me that un¬ less poetry hastens to revitalize itself at the Pierian fountain, it is destined rapidly to retrogress towards that primitive guttural in which it had its origin. As things stand at present, the man of let¬ ters would be well advised to draw the obvious moral from an ele¬ mentary survey of literary history. Pre-Socratic Magi made a haunt¬ ing melody of the most forbiddingly metaphysical of themes; Dante and Chaucer sang with a more than amateurish insight of the nature of humours and Hell; and even as late as the sixteenth century, in the post-Ptolemaic twilight before Scripture was wholly discredited, the moral Milton penned a fervent epic upon the adventures of an attractive Devil who darted nonchalantly around in the extra-mun¬ dane chaos and matched his wits with his God. These men made brilliant music of the intellectual currents of their times. Since the incorporation of empiricism, however, and the Royal Society’s in¬ sistence upon a “mathematical plainness” of speech, the dominant tendency has been for the paths of literature and science increasingly to diverge; and while the truth-seekers have described an ever changing absolute with all the verbal inflation of Kant Darwin, the poets have grown constantly more obscure and insipid until they threaten to outdo even the philosophers in the fine art of in¬ coherent profundity. What between Mr. Joyce and the Soviet cam¬ paign for social propaganda, art is today perched precariously with one foot in the grave and the other waving about in frantic icono- clasm in the hope of convincing itself that it is still alive. That, of course, presents a problem for the Euthanasians; but in the mean¬ time certain academic Isaiahs might at least clamber down from their lecterns and give us something more aesthetically significant than hysterical pacifism in a subterranean vault. We have already languished too long under the twofold delusion that poetry is a mere stimulus of 1 pleasurable emotion, while Mr. Poincare’s “con¬ venient conventions” have a more than pragmatic truth; and if we are ever to be freed from these popular fallacies .... Let us bow our heads and pray! [12]

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AS LOVED OUR FATHERS As loved our fathers, let us love old things; Grass in fields, stirred by warm winds; Leaves in woody groves whispering quietly: Rain making spotty patterns on burning ground, The glint of rivulets made by melting snow, The far speck of horizon uninvaded by trees: And put away this hour of whirring belt, The piston threshing in its steel tomb; The squeal of turning metal in the lathe, Clouds of foul smoke killing foliage, slowly blackening, Faces hungry, hammer, sickle, marching, cheering; Smells of sweat, grime, oil, and chemicals; For tears fall into rivers here, To speed far out to sea. —W. A. McKay, Theo. EVENING AT BASSWOOD LAKE Here stay for me the feverish bustling round Through many days. Let my dulled sense find Each gentle woodland sound. Here let the lazy ripplings of the tide, As on the pebbled beach its waters climb Under the chafing wind, Bring to the tired soul, forgetfulness of time. Sweet rest that follows every joyous day, Uncovering the beauty of the night To men who tire of play; Sweet coolness of the quiet-falling dusk, Absolving us from heated passion’s sway: Too much we sought delight In strained pursuits, while here our truest pleasure lay. —R. Purvis-Smith, ’39. Moore s — Open all night including Sunday [14]