NotabiliaOn the Francis Bergen Medal
One of the most charming of all the intellectual traditions of Yale is the group of Francis Bergen Memorial lectures delivered each year gratis to the University. Mr. Frank Bergen has lately added another memorial to his son. It takes the form of a gold medal to be awarded each year at theLit.dinner by the outgoing board to the author of the most creditable contribution to theLit.during their term of office. The editors themselves are ineligible.
Francis Bergen was in the Class of 1914, and a member of theLit.board of that year. He was a college poet of distinction and promise. Had it not been for his tragic death on his way to Plattsburg, and with a few more years of lyric inspiration, it is likely that his poetry would have served itself as his own commanding memorial.
As it is, he is a traditional character of the Renaissance. You will meet no graduates of his generation who do not remember in greater or less degree Bergen’s extraordinary Turkish water pipe, and his long conversations with imaginary personages in his own room, unconscious of the attentive and astonished ears of his classmates about him. And the miracle is that in the Yale of then, still smacking of the Y-sweatered bulldog ideal, he should have been universally loved and admired, in spite of eccentricity. Such tales are indeed the romance of the beginning of wisdom at Yale.
This medal, this awarded piece of gold, this honor in the eyes of the literati of each winner’s generation at Yale, has about it a glamor of remembrance, a glory peculiar to itself. It is in memory of a poet whom the Gods loved too well, and did not allow to sing his fill. By its own name it is an inspiration more precious than gold.
M. E. F.