The Winthrop-Comstock Lion Rampant was named by The Nation last spring as one of the ten best college magazines in the country, but the current issue of this little magazine does not quite live up to the accolade. It does not, in fact, even live up to its own pretensions. The Lion Rampant contains a depressingly great quantity of writing by people who cannot write and, worse yet, bad writing by usually good writers.

The most notable member of this latter category is Robert Dawson '64. Three of Dawson's poems appear in the magazine; they must have been retrieved from his waste basket by some copy hungry Lion Rampant editor. The poet seems to lack any rudimentary "feel" for the music of poetry, and much of his imagery is contrived and almost meaningless. For example:

We yoked the three repeating ghosts

To blast our canaan boy to goose.

Tiny Bernie, wisely cricket,

Thumped us with a crutch of horn.

Now, I don't know how Dawson wants his readers to react to this stanza of "Bernie's Christmas," but I responded with an unequivocal "Huh?"

"The Poet at Second Base" is not so esoteric, but it is difficult to decide whether to take Dawson's far-fetched metaphor seriously.

Gruesome and Annoying

The longest story in the magazine, David Littlejohn's Conversation With a Corpse," is just as disappointing. Is gruesome--both the story and the writing. The narrative centers around a man who takes care of corpses in a hospital and talks so them. It gets pretty cloying after a while. Littlejohn introduces a lot of gory detail, but the detail does not contribute significantly to the development of the story.

The author's style is rather annoying:

Her feet were twisted into one another, and the toenails looked like they hadn't been out for months, like a hawk's She was the thinnest person I had ever seen: she looked like these pictures from the concentration camps, except that her body was all by itself, and it was green. The skin just flopped ever her bones like the stuff you pick off the top of cocoa with your spoon.

Littlejohn rambles on in this vein for ten tedious pages. The reader, however, can conquer the tedium by letting his mind wander and try to guess whose style Littlejohn is trying to imitate.

Other contributions to the Lion Rampant outdo the mediocrity of Dawson and Littlejohn. Cecile Williamson's "Atlanta" is the most feeble imitation of literature in the magazine. Skirmante Makaitis translated two folk tales from the Lithuanian (apparently into English). One of them, "Stolen Bread," begins:

There was a serf who led a very unfortunate life. His landlord, pretending to goodness, gave him a lot overgrown with wood. "Work it," he said, "and it shall be yours."