United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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ALSTA: I didn’t lie, I used action in the sense of being acted upon. OSCAR: True, you quivered like a loose blanc-mange, thrust your chattering money in your month old sock, and heavily fumed your bed. You changed your ocular guards all night long. All this is action. He threatened to shoot us, only if we dared surprise him in his bed. ALSTA: Oscar, art is selection. Not every detail suits the selected theme. OSCAR: Pardon. ALSTA: Granted, proselyte. (Janet returns.) JANET: The long hovering summer clouds are burst and water my thirsty dying roots. What a happy union is this. ALSTA: (alarmed) Union? JANET: Yes. Of action and meditation in you. You have taught me much, Sesame . . . You must permit me to join your faith. Tell me the creed and the awful rites of initiation. Well, daren’t you let me in? ALSTA: (cautiously) O well, there is no ceremony, and only a few tricks to be learned. One, catch your man on a ferry, he can’t refuse you there. Two, conceal all bags behind the largest. (It all sounds rather idiotic.) JANET: O Sesame! How prosaic. Teach me to love men dearly, wisdom of owls, pride of lions, (laughingly she adds) And I want to be at one with all of creation that hitch-hiked once, remember, in its entirety. ■ OSCAR: With whom? JANET: Noah, you ass . . . Sesame, I have thought of a magnificent act of initiation. I possess the lamb which is to be sacrificed to purify my sin of blindness. ALSTA: What lamb? (The spring which produced fountains of ideas hitherto has apparently dried up. He fears because he does not understand the nature or extent of his conquest.) JANET: Push, Sesame! Push, lord and mas¬ ter. (She begins to push the car and Alsta assists mesmerically. Janet steers it as she walks. The car swings to the right and over a precipice . . . There is a long awful silence following the crash.) The deed that purifies, makes a disciple of, and will probably kill, Janet Suracci. (An enormous black taxi rounds a distant bend. It looks like a great menacing beetle.) It’s my father, Alsta, he got my message. God have mercy on us. (Her voice sounds like a tolling bell. Alsta slumps down onto his enormous sack looking white and limp. Janet stands behind him hands on his shoulders. She is trembling a little.) It will be hell. But he who can face a gun can face a grizzly bear. (Oscar picks up his bag and hurries off.) ALSTA: Where are you going Oscar in my hour of need? OSCAR: Exploring. ALSTA: Exploring? OSCAR: O yes. To find a tributary of courage to divert into your waterfall of wisdom. Goodbye. THE CURTAIN FALLS Ode to the Editor Who Would Laugh at Genius He casts an aspersion upon my ambition To write for a public; (whose woeful condition Makes reading seem well-nigh impossible). Hence, in order to spite him I’ve decided to write him A verse that is wastebasket-tossible. —Des McCalmont. Page Thirty-one

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JANET: The wind and the buzzing bee. Two! ALSTA: O! You’re extinct. You’re fossilized, Oscar was right. The bee was excommunicated by the Edict of Parathyne. JANET: Was the wind laid off? (Her tone is bitterly sarcastic.) ALSTA: O, yes, definitely. Made redundant by a shower of pollen-filled shells, bayonets of dabbers, and a miraculous contraption for lay¬ ing smoke-screens of magic apple-dust. JANET: Who else is unemployed? ALSTA: An unreliable tipster called Cli¬ mate, with his overcomplicated system of per¬ mutations. He’s replaced by nests of aluminum serpents spitting government inspected meas¬ ures. JANET: And where might I find all this? ALSTA: Under Allah’s quilt. JANET: And how did you interpret— ALSTA: O, yes. I missed the battle of the fireblight, and the collect for the day derived therefrom, recalling all prayers for Earth’s par¬ don and the forgiveness of Heaven’s transgres¬ sions, recited to the accompaniment of the Inter¬ national Anthem, whose theme is the overthrow of the kingdom of Streptococci and played on a quartet of cyclotrons. JANET: And who told you? ALSTA: A dry and weather-cracked old man, foretelling his wind-scattered end in little leeward spittles. You’d have dismembered him in the draft of your racer. I rode one hundred miles with him. JANET: And you gave him in return? ALSTA: What an insufferable barrage of questions! A noble Roman’s request and a great artist’s gift, an ear. JANET: Tell me, how are you jaegers in thrills? ALSTA: Oscar tells best of a forty-nine mile drive in the company of four spirited Indians. JANET: Drunken Indians? Of course he ordered them to stop. ALSTA: Yes. So they offered him a drink, and demonstrated a well argued superiority by an experiment in volumes. JANET: He refused, of course. ALSTA: And violate an Adam-made de¬ cree? Refuse meat or drink the symbol of amity? Have mercy woman! JANET: Is this your fox in stealth? He was cowardly. ALSTA: Nonsense! Scientific! Is it good me¬ chanics to try to balance eight hundred wine- wild pounds of flesh against one hundred and forty-two? JANET: Where did the thrills begin? ALSTA: Along a mountain road, when a blissful squaw played blind man’s buff with the driver. JANET: (She ponders awhile, and a com¬ paratively pleasant expression dawns on her face). I hope you’re not as scandalously low as Oscar. (Alsta loosens his collar.) How I long for the open sesame. I could un¬ lock my gates to. Are you a cougar in courage? ALSTA: One sundown, out of the grotesque yellow smelter-fog of Trail, and the currents of the wide Columbia, carving the black and tan toffee hills, we divined a certain manic-depres¬ sive, self-schooled Mumbo Jumbo from medieval Wales. A doctor of a race of fire-possessed caco- demons. He took us to his den. JANET: Was he mad? ALSTA: Until they brought a polio-wither¬ ed crone. Then he removed his shirt together with a concatenation of diabolical amulets— animal magnetism, celery viruses, and a hotch potch of atmospheric pressures—-and woke the sleeping nerve with his Clarion fingers. JANET: Then he was practical! Sane! ALSTA: O quite. He threatened to shoot us. (Oscar returns—panting. He is delighted to see an obvious thaw in the icy face of Janet.) JANET: Were you afraid? What did you do? ALSTA: I was instantly seized by action. Cougar in courage (he adds superciliously. Janet rushes to him uttering ecstatic noises and kisses him violently). JANET: O Sesame! Sesame! You are a man of courage. OSCAR: The name is Alsta, Alsta Fyffe. JANET: Sesame Fyffe! What a glorious name, I thought you were word without deed. (She rushes off to peer down the highway as if expecting someone. They hear her singing to herself. Sesame, Sesame). OSCAR: O, what a rogue and peasant knave you are. Page Thirty

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The Poetry of Pope By ARDYCE MAYES FPHE key to an understanding of the poetry of Pope lies, I think, in a study of his back¬ ground and personality. The year 1688, which marked the “bloodless” death of the Stuart dynasty in England, and marked a new era in British Constitutionalism, marked also the birth of a superb literary genius. Alexander Pope was born into a Catholic home at a time when, understandably enough. England looked upon Catholicism with eyes of hatred and suspicion. Thus, from the beginning, Pope suffered the persecution always attending one who is of a spurned religion, and was made conscious of his inferior position in society. When we add to this the fact that he was cursed from birth with a sickly and deformed body, it is not hard to understand how all of Pope’s thinking, and thus his poetry, was colored in¬ evitably by a feeling of intense bitterness against all those who persecuted him. This feel¬ ing is particularly evident in his writing of “The Duncaid,” in which he really does seem to be “a tortured victim screaming out the shrillest taunts at his tormentors.” Apart from these natural social disadvantages Pope was, of course, a particularly likely target for abuse because he was possessed of a morbid sensitiveness and a vanity of remarkably vast proportions, which naturally stung his enemies to bitter taunts upon occasion. However, Pope was possessed also of a real tender-heartedness and bore a great affection for those whom he sincerely esteemed, as his devotion to Walsh, Gay, Caryll, and later Swift affirms. There is something strangely pathetic about Pope’s eagerness to be always supported by some sturdier arm. There is something commanding our admiration, too, in his fervent determination to climb to the highest pinnacle of contempo¬ rary fame, in spite of his social position and a contemptible physical deformity. What a monu¬ mental achievement—that a man with such odds against him should, with his pen, win his way to the center of the highest social circle of his day! This heart abnormally sensitive, which un¬ fortunately was as capable of bitter resentment as of warm affection, undoubtedly explains in part the almost diabolical cruelty of some of Pope’s personal satire, of which the Sporus por¬ trait in the “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” forms the most outstanding example. Even the “Rape of the Lock,” though the satirical pattern is much more subtly woven, suggests the brilliant wit whose laughter at the “little unguarded follies of the female sex” takes on a slightly con¬ temptuous note. This would come perhaps from Pope’s resentment against fine ladies blinded to his genius by his physical deformity. Stephen has said that while we feel pity for the many sufferings to which Pope’s unusual sensitiveness exposed him, we feel also a sort of horror, even contempt, for the bitter animosities which must have “tortured the man who cherished them even more than they did his victims.” From this glance at Pope’s background and personality we should pass, I think, to some examination of the important influences which directed his poetic genius and molded his literary ideals. It was Dryden whom the young Pope admired most and chose as his poetical ideal. The “Essay on Criticism” contains this tribute to the genius of Dryden: “Hear how Timotheus’ varied lays surprize. And bid alternate passions fall and rise. The pow’r of music all our hearts allow, And what Timotheus was, is Dryden now.” Certainly one of the most potent influences upon Pope’s literary style was exercised by the eminent contempory critic Walsh, who urged the young Pope to an ambition for “correct¬ ness.” For Pope and his contemporaries this word “correctness” meant in effect the doctrine of Aristotle, who had considered poetry as an “imitation,” but imitation in the creative sense. The poet must not simply copy what he finds before him—his art must help Nature to realize the perfection which she is aiming at but is always being accidentally prevented from realizing. By seeking the “common ground in Page Thirty-two