NEW BOOK OF HARVARD LIFE

After the treatment which the College, and especially its undergraduate part, has received at the hands of literature during the past ten or dozen years, such a performance as Mr. Bynner's ode inspires, first of all, gratitude. It views the College from no warped social angle, it presents no special group, it is a thorough summing up of the experience of the average undergraduate. He can lay his finger on this poem and say "This and this is the Harvard College which I knew."

Though the name sounds formidable, the form of the ode is very free. Its length, some fifty pages of the book, enables the author to cover the field,--the Yard, Harvard bridge, the Stadium, the river, Marliave's, Class Day--all the haunts and activities of the normal undergraduate. A few lines of quotation will give an idea of its tone:

"Old Yard, good-bye again!--With your friendly trees of knowledge,

"You were fully half, yes more than that, the better half of college!

"O, think of the luckless wights

"Whom all this didn't please,

"Who'd rather have electric lights

"Than memories like these!"

Or again, of an invasion of the proctor on a Freshman jubilee:

"And how we liked him for it; though we had just begun--

"But the Lord is now my proctor,

"And it isn't half the fun."

Page after page of the poem deals with undergraduate life from the inside, from the undergraduate's point of view, in terms which will be as intelligible twenty years from today as to the class of 1907. Mr. Bynner has struck out lines which phrase the Harvard College of his own time in a thoroughly representative spirit. The poem is as unique among odes as it is among works dealing with the life in American colleges. George Ade has satirized the exuberance of the western "universities"; Cornell, Princeton, Columbia and Harvard has each its volume of "stories." The striking fact about Mr. Bynner's ode is that it could no more have come from any other college in America except Harvard than the life it portrays could be the life of any other college. It would appear that the impulse which Harvard gives to such work is its own reward.

*"An Ode to Harvard and Other Poems" by W. Bynner '02. Small, Maynard & Company.