Lion Rampant

The Winthrop House Lion Rampant has just made its first appearance in nearly ten months, and the quality of the material in the magazine makes one wonder what the editors have been doing all that time.

Seven poems appear in the Lion Rampant, three by Bayard Chandler, a graduate student who will have a book of poetry published this fall. Chandler's writing is execrable; his use of imagery would provide budding poets with an excellent catalogue of flagrant errors to avoid. "In the Fall" abounds with trite images and mixed metaphors:

Beneath the fountain of the sunset

That sprayed gold-tinged pillars of sunlight,

The apples would fall on tiers of scarlet leaves.

The girl slept among cynanic bluebells....

Chandler's "Nightshade" contrasts a woman, who lives in a world of "bright flowers and effervescent dreams," with the speaker, a night-person whose world is associated with the subway. This theme has possibilities; certainly the eerie and depressing nature of a 3 A.M. subway ride offers fertile material for the perceptive poet. Yet Chandler's images, completely unimaginative, merely roam between the prosaic ("The city is lonely after midnight") and the ludicrous ("There are flowers in the city of the moon: painted in faded colors on the subway walls")

The most ambitions poem in the Lion Rampant is Kevin Lewis' "March, Returned From Home," which describes the thoughts and recollections of a college student who is walking through a wooded area, the scene of many childhood adventures. Lewis' murky style makes it difficult for the reader to have any sort of response to the poem without "studying" it:

Inquisition or romance unrolls a faded rug before the fallen yellow sun before the prickly tree fringe beyond the stones and chimneys.

Bare maple branches hedge in broken circles, stiffened angular and hard, narrowed into junctured birdflight, enamelled with the gloss of previous light rain.

Seventy-four lines of this is too much. The central image of the poem is an old sewage pipe through which he and his childhood companions once crawled. If Lewis had pared down the poem to focus on this symbol and eliminated the endless verbiage about cold snow, matted leaves, flat grasses, maple hedges, gray stems, tattered bark, and yellow sun, "March, Returned From Home" could have been a good poem. As it stands, it is sprawling, chaotic, and almost incomprehensible.

One of the two short stories in the magazine, Dan Hobbing's "A Common Mistake," has a typical boy-shags-girl plot: boy meets girl in bar, and has just one thing on his mind; girl wants to go through the motions of young, exhilirating romance; they go through the motions, then go to bed.

I confess that I just can't make up my mind about Hobbing's story. At times it seems trite, pretensious, completely predictable, and lacking in subtlety. Other times it impresses me as a poignant tightly-constructed narrative. Is this moving or is it hackneyed?

Hobbing's entire story describes a highly emotional, but very common situation. The girl, Carla, wants to "run down a hill with the wind in her hair" before having intercourse. The male goes along with her whim, for obvious reasons. But how genuine is the girl? Is she consciously acting? Is she deluding herself about love to justify sex? Is she really in love? This is a very real situation, and Hobbing's ability to recreate the ambiguity which surrounds it helps compensate for the story's stylistic failures.

Stephen Goodwin's "Scratch" contrasts with the tightly drawn plot of "A Common Mistake." The story meanders from a description of a river, to a poker game, to a quarrel between two men over money, to violence over a pool game. Structurally, "Scratch" is a terrible story. And yet, Goodwin probably has more writing talent than any other contributor to the Lion Rampant. His story begins, The water was named in derision by a generation of luckless farmers: Burnt Crop Creek, because they had watched the stalks of cotton and even of corn wither in the sun, and heard the heavy winds rattle through the hone dry fields like seeds ticking in a gourd. They merely quit the land, leaving that fractious patient stream to reclaim its banks. Another generation arose, their birthright of planting cancelled: they went through the forest and chalked the highest hardwoods. Not long after the oxen in jangling chains shafted road and tore the earth as they pulled the felled trunks to the water.... But the stream endured that too, it was granted one last fringe of privacy, one forest ribbon for its sequestering. So the water was left with a rag of honor and nothing of its former magnificence.

This is clear, forceful writing. As a short story, "Scratch" is a failure, but no one can realistically expect perfection from undergraduate writers. The technical side of writing can be learned, but Goodwin has the one necessary endowment of a developing author--a facility with words, an entertaining style. It is the lack of this attribute which makes the rest of the Lion Rampant a failure.