A @rinnell Q'Lhrtatmmi ﬂuent

By James Arieti. Katherine Newkirk, and divers hands

Sing, Muse, Josiah Newton, skilled in learning

All ways traditional, and always yearning

To strive, to seek, to find the shortest line

To Burling, in its confines to define

Himself the model and the paradigm

Of liberal arts and crafts. For such a crime

What punishment will serve, sing, Muse, in
reasoned rhyme.

Where was Josiah when the diggers dined

Al fresco, on the house? He was inclined

To stand, with books in hand, the child of Patience,

A prisoner in Quad; no race relations

Affect his appetite; the hot orations

Old Adam Clayton Powell gave escape

His notice, like the salad with the grape

When SDiS. midwesterners conferred

He espied no strangers and he said no word.

One day, to vary his prescribed routine,

He tried South Lounge for study; how “obscene!”

The Lounge was filled with—people! Not a book

In sight. Three times our hero sought to look

At what the crowd portended three times sought

To give the obscene scene the sense it ought

To have, Never perceiving an IV,

Our dullard hero was too dumb to see

The issue from the open dorms. The flux

Of Schneirov‘s hearing was for him no crux:

“So stood the pius prince, unmov'd, and long

Susiain'cl the madness of the noisy throng."

And if his frowning countenance grew ruddy

It simply meant he had no place to study.

“Sign our petition,” fellow students cry.

“Be off, base creatures," he would first reply.

“But there‘s a world to change, and you must sign!

Where is your social conscience? Where your
spine?”

To keep things just the same, he’d sign the dotted
line.

Then when his hall declared home, floor, room rule

And girls were constant of the promiscuous school.

His serious work was not by giggles drowned:

Earplugs in place, his thoughts were still profound.

Alas, of what avail were plugs that night

When he returned from Burling’s put-out light,

Only to find a note upon his door:

“Hey, Jos, flake off a couple hours more."

What could he do? The lounges all were filled

Twenty-four hours. Passive bodies spilled

Where’er he gazed; the classrooms all were locked.

Our hero (sigh!) could not go off half-cocked.

There was no place to go, So down he squats

In the cold hall and studies, But fate plots

Graph and corruption. Girls must use the head

And so distract him from what must be read.

Still life goes noisy on: when he could use

His room for study, other things confuse.

One night his dorm was wracked with shotgun
blast,

J. B. Grinnell. to whom our poem is dedicated.

Next day KDIC th’event broadcast

In muddy intervals of rock and roll:

Event and outcome both beyond control.
But even shotgun blasts were lesser Hell
Beside (Sing, Muse, What mortal could foretell
Besides you) that great shock the earthquake brews
For those who read about it in the news.

Not girlish hockey-ettes nor their great prize
Could draw his pious concentrated eyes,

Nor nude dance from the black continents:
Josiah was intolerant of sense.

Leggett's proposal did arouse some wrath:
No open Burling was its aftermath.

High in his independent carrell, Low

Never distressed him from the depths below.
And as a heavier isotope reacts

More slowly, and allows for clearer facts

Of its behavior to emerge, as when

The sociologist would study men

He picks a backward race, extrapolating
Like the behaviorist, each rat-race rating,
Or as the ponderous mammoth elephant
Suggests by laggard pace the final haunt
And ivoried tomb of all his genus’ clan,

Just so Josiah.

Dimly he learned about each beauty queen
When, coming home, his parents made the scene.
Never before, to such a vast extent,

Was there a boy who failed in each event.

In worth and trivia both he was too crass:
He never was a member of his class.

One would imagine that he had been born
To do the course evaluation form.

But man’s a spectrum of activity;

He must participate, or cease to be.

Grinnell provides us all such opportunity.

 

