Vol. LXXXVIII No. 3

The
Yale Literary Magazine

Conducted by the
Students of Yale University.

“Dum mens grata manet, nomen laudesque Yalenses

Cantabunt Soboles, unanimique Patres.”

December, 1922.

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THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE

Contents

DECEMBER, 1922

The Yale Literary Magazine

EDITORS

BUSINESS MANAGERS

Leader

Here at Yale we are inclined to take things rather too much for granted. We talk glibly of our traditions as something everlasting, and forget that most of them originated in the vague limbo of eighteen-ninety. We unconsciously consider the College of to-day to be the same as our fathers knew, and so it is astonishing to find in the musty pages of an old Lit. an account of “the more splendid entrances of Durfee, a building which is certainly ornamental and whose rooms are spacious and elegant”.

For, in general, we have accepted our surroundings as a permanent matter of fact, and have not stopped to analyze just why they are as they are. Most of us hardly know the reason for our being here at all. In our four years we are continually passing through a series of changes—παντα ρει—everything is in a state of flux. Our ideas and ideals, our opinions and our minds are ever changing, developing, broadening. The Senior is the Freshman only in that he is the unifying body in which during the four-year span these many shifting thoughts have been welded together, and the instant has in truth been made eternity. For the Freshman is too engrossed with the business of becoming acclimatized, heeling some publication or other activity, and making friends to have much time for anything else. Towards the close of the spring term he looks forward to Sophomore year with a certain relish. Then is when he will do all that reading and extra study, that plain living and high thinking, which he has planned. But, curiously enough, Sophomore year brings with it new and unforeseen petty distractions which devour the time at an incredible rate, and leave no more room for contemplation than the year previous.

And so with the last half of the cycle: the two final years swing by confusedly and bring us to the precipice of graduation, a charm or two on our watch chain, a smattering of knowledge which we may or may not find comforting, nothing more.

Our development has been somewhat of a hand to mouth affair. We have learned certain unrelated facts about this and that, and have sketchily attempted to piece them together. But ordinarily they have not fitted, because we have not devoted enough sheer intellectual effort to the analysis of our own ideas. We have not the slightest conception of what we believe. We may have learned to think with reasonable clarity, and our ideals may be rather high, but we have built up no scheme of life, nothing by which to live. Any philosophy or creed which we may possess is, at best, vague, inchoate, and fragmentary.

This, as I have said, is because we have never searched our souls with the cold, relentless light of reason in an attempt to understand every fiber of our make-up, we have taken things for granted, we have known only our exteriors, we have not known ourselves.

And living thus almost entirely on the surface, we have inevitably grown to think of a philosophy of life as hardly an essential. “What need have I for all this truck about religion?”, we ask frankly, for we have not yet been brought face to face with the Truth that in order to realize our highest possibilities we must be utterly dominated by an ideal. We wish to move the world, but we have not yet been impressed with the necessity of having a place to stand. We have not been convinced that we must believe in something.

The whole question has seemed to be something ethereal, something far removed from our own natural lives. Consequently we have been inclined to think of religion as little else but repression and that its followers knew nothing either of happiness or of life. They seemed to belong to a world apart—to a world that was drab and unreal.

So Christianity has become the most forbidding word in the language. Judging it by its present fruits—by a decadent church and by sweaty Y.M.C.A. gymnasiums—we have pronounced it to be woefully lacking. We have not seen that these are in reality not fruits at all, but abortions, that although the church in its present form has outlived its usefulness, the spirit which exists in each one of us is as dominating now as it ever was, if only we will open our hearts to it. We have never stopped to think these questions through to their conclusion. We take untruths and half-truths for granted, and allow misconceptions to pass current without ever a sincere effort to get at the eternal strength of things.

And so we hear men talk of humility, and we laugh at them. We wish to assert ourselves, to express our own individuality, and being humble seems to convey the very opposite. We look upon it as something synonymous with servility, as a state of grovelling self-abasement in which a man must sacrifice both his personality and his self-respect.

We hear men talk of brotherly love and it seems to us a farce. How could anybody pretend to care for everyone equally, to put his closest friend and the man in the street in the same class? What could be more unnatural, more hypocritical?

And again we hear men talk of self-surrender and we hate them for it. Why should I surrender myself? I am I. I possess my ideas and ideals, and these are enough. Why should I not strive to realize them without any external aid, any “something not myself”?

Thus we argue and thus we feel because we are repelled by words whose meaning we do not really understand. Our minds have never pried deeply enough to find the Truth that humility is nothing mean, nothing subservient, but rather the natural consciousness of reverence before everything beautiful and sacred in the universe. We have thought the ideal of brotherly love to be futile because we have looked upon it only superficially. We have not realized that instead of a mere question of surface like or dislike, it involves a tremendous tolerance and sympathy with all of mankind, and that although difficult, if not impossible, to attain in its fulness, it certainly is the antithesis of hypocritical. We have loathed the very sound of self-surrender because we have taken the word in its cold and literal sense, and have not understood that instead of sacrificing any trace of individuality in giving ourselves up to the spiritual and the ideal, we find instead a new fulness and depth to life. For self-surrender is actually a self-realization more compelling than our brightest dreams.

F. O. MATTHIESSEN.

Poems

I.

Sometimes you are younger than the dawn;

But sometimes you are older than the stars.

Your eyes are made that way: new light is drawn

From the piled gold where ancient suns have gone,

When your gaze reaches mine. Immersed in wars,

I seek rebellion, fearing to rebel;

And sigh, not yet desirous of relief;

And grieve, not yet relinquishing my grief;

And love the more—I who have loved so well.

II.

I love you. But it is a sorry task

To probe the depths of why or how I love.

We lovers are more fools the more we ask

What lurks behind our kisses, what the mask

Of rotting flesh conceals. Surely I love.

Surely? Great heaven, who would tell the moon

That she’s the light when she herself is cold?

Without your love mine would be growing old;

Without your eyes, mine would be ashes soon.

III.

Ashes? Yet there is something infinite

About an ash—hoary and cold and wise.

Across the spent fires of the night they flit,

And often when the day grows pale, they sit,

Like monarchs, on a vanished enterprise.

Ah, even thus my young love would endure!

Without her light the moon would still express

Her strength, in shadows not yet bodiless—

Hoary and cold and wise: thus am I sure.

IV.

I have addressed you with love’s first address:

I’ve sealed the envelope with all my soul.

Each day you add one burden to distress:

Your silence! Ah, what icy ghosts caress

Expectant hearts when women are the goal—

What undreamt women do we hope to see

When gazing like tired children heavenward!

We say: God help us if our souls are barred

From the white arches of infinity.

V.

Strange that your silence is so deafening

And your unwritten page so full of thought!

Each time they do not come your letters bring

A chaos of conjecture, gathering

Its forces like mad winds, ’till I am caught—

And swept—and swept into an agony.

Ah, ruinous silence that awakes such stress!

The noisy thunders of my heart suppress

The frail, pale music of my memory.

VI.

How long! How long, great God, must I regret

Fleshly communions with the scattered ghosts

Whom in the by-ways of the past I met,

And whom I am desirous to forget,

Lest at their feasts they shout aloud old toasts

And grin with laughter that is desolate?

For then the crimson tinge would cross your cheek—

A tragic color—and your heart would seek

Mutely for spring, though shorn of leaves by Fate.

VII.

Winter! It is not winter when the snows

Whiten the houses and the bare brown trees.

It is not winter when the north wind blows,

Nor yet when mountain lakes are glazed, and floes

On the horizons of the Arctic freeze.

There is no winter if the heart is warm!—

And I would ask you to remember it.

My dear, when you are silent, I must sit

Frozen among the figures of the storm.

VIII.

What do I mean by such queer similes?

O heart beloved, I mean to show you how

The red autumnal stretches of the trees

In crystal twilight, ere the black ponds freeze,

Would but reflect your stillness, were I now

To tell you things a man’s life most conceals:

And next to say that what the autumn is

To you, winter would be to me. And this

Seems all that any simile reveals.

IX.

When marble wears the touch of Grecian hands,

Or Leonardo’s paints on canvas live,

I think the gods are building on the sands

Castles of stone, but no one understands

How much they can inspire one heart to give:

Though I who dream about your untouched hair

Can follow Leonardo’s rapid brush,

And with it paint those yearning strokes, and crush

Beneath a large ideal, life’s strong despair.

X.

Dante was more than half of Beatrice!

Thus for a woman’s warm identity

We men go asking where our heaven is,

And having found it, for that woman’s kiss

We build the altars and the destiny.

O Beatrice! How much we would forget,

If Dante had forgotten what to write!

The Silence and the Distance and the Night—

These he erased—and we remember yet!

XI.

But more than half of Dante was her frame—

So fragile and so exquisite that rime

Could but produce the soundings of her name,

And leave all cold the radiance, the flame

Which from her gaze swept Dante out of time.

Oh, say not that a woman ever dies

When Dante loves her! Yet when Dante loves,

His soul becomes the body that he loves:

A woman will not have it otherwise.

XII.

If Beauty can be kind I know it not,

Because you have not touched me with your lips,

Nor yielded with your eyes. It is my lot

To sit, an outcast on some barren spot,

And watch the summer clouds, like treasure-ships,

Sailing beyond me toward the evening.

The beauty there is infinite, is blue!—

But pitiless as effigies of you,

And bitter with remembrance of the spring.

XIII.

I am a madman in the wilderness:

The gods of anger have bestirred my pen.

Where is your magic now? Or your caress?

The pressure of your arms, your tenderness?

I’ll tear myself away from these, since men

Are not as angels are—eternally.

Damnation!—ah, but hush—see, my wild hands!

If pity be the food my heart demands,

Then for the love of heaven pity me.

XIV.

Or do not pity me. Love is too great

For kindly words and sighs and handkerchiefs.

Your eyes will be my stars, your arms my fate,

And I shall wait for these, although I wait

Until the ship goes shattering on reefs

Which lurk beyond horizons sailed in vain.

Then let the ocean froth, let tempests rave;

Let the straight masts bow stiffly to their grave;

Let the old love go—go—nor come again!

XV.

My lady condescends! A little note

Written, upon my soul, in hat and glove,

Leaves everything unsaid: and what she wrote

Would strangle the young cupid by the throat,

If he were not immortal. I may love,

And she—is glad to have it so. Ah me!

How fine a woman draws the thread of hair

Which holds her lover dangling in the air,

Suspended above all eternity.

RUSSELL W. DAVENPORT.

Five Sonnets

1.

My friends will have it that I might have been

A lover, and not thus have loved in vain,

Had I had strength enough to kill the rain

That showered on the April of our scene.

And art to be impassioned and serene,

And worn the guise of Abel, being Cain,

Worshipping in a mild bucolic vein

The blinding fire of the cold eyes of my queen.

And calmly in their quiet judicial way,

They tell me that the pictures I have drawn

Of you are fantasies of my poor brain,

And when, if ever, we shall meet again

You will not be a person of the dawn,

Or Love, herself, uprising from the spray.

2.

But I can laugh with them at their good jokes,

Knowing they are not serious, and reply

That heaven is something less than a wild sky,

And love only a pretty, human hoax.

Do I not see what all their laughter cloaks,

And know that really they would gladly die,

Rather than idly pass your beauty by,

Which all the dreaming of their hearts invokes.

They are ingenious fellows and will play,

But in the elements they are the same

As I, building the altars of their souls

To something that is nameless in a name,

And, like a bell upon the night-tide, tolls

Setting them midst their capers all to pray.

3.

This something seems at times of less import

Than what is built thereto. The altars rise

Immeasurable records of surmise;

The achievement is indeed of the great sort,

The length of their magnificence not short,

But in our wonder at their grace and size

Can we forget they were fashioned for your eyes,

Or make of those oblivion in our sport!

Oh no, the idolater finds the idol still,

Though there be pyramids to dazzle him,

And paintings of high art along the wall,

Still there is left the goddess young and slim,

Her lips still breathe, her breasts still rise and fall,—

He kills himself, if her he tries to kill.

4.

But these my friends like other men do eat,

And sleep, and spend most merrily their while

Upon this lily-earth; their hours beguile

Each other, each with a memory to repeat.

And if by chance they do a noble feat

It is for them the subject of a smile,

For they know well at some uncertain mile

Staunch military Death will blow retreat.

Till in a moment they are one with me,

And Love has conquered in an unseen way

The turrets and the bulwarks of their dreams.

No longer is to-morrow yesterday,

Nor life the pagan paradox it seems,

And they are begging immortality.

5.

Immortal girl, what I have said in mirth

About these people,—it is true of me,

Only they live still rich in poverty,

While I am one beyond the reach of earth.

These, of their parent clay, still weigh the worth,

And hesitate to plunge into the sea.

But I, the sooner lost, have found in thee

A new and an eternal kind of birth.

Because your eyes are flaming, and must burn,

Your body fire that kills, your beauty death,

I love, worshipping that which I desire.

Icarus knew no more: I breathe thy breath,

And touch thy hair;—if I to dust return

At least I shall be cinders, you still fire.

MAXWELL E. FOSTER.

Dagonet

You come to me for guidance? That’s a queer

Anomaly, to ask an aged man

What course in Life he recommends, what plan

Of conduct,—ask the King, or Bedivere....

The King is dead? Oh, I recall,—last year

It was; and Bedivere, last of the clan

To follow, like a tired veteran

Obeyed the hand that beckoned from the mere.

Yes, I remember now: in Camelot

When Life was wrapped about us like a flame

How we enjoyed the zeal of Arthur’s rule.