Photographed above is Miss Eldred Scott (1902-1939) at the time of her engagement to young Ben Hosmer in 1919. She was about seventeen.

Those familiar with the Community Collection will recognize Scott’s name, if not her face: her painting “Gnostic Bridge” records the site of an accident that took her fianceé Ben Hosmer. I can’t look at this photo without recalling the final line of a poem by Edna St Vincent Millay: “Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.”

The Buck in the Snow

by Edna St Vincent Millay

White sky, over the hemlocks bowed with snow,
Saw you not at the beginning of evening the antlered buck and his doe
Standing in the apple orchard? I saw them. I saw them suddenly go,
Tails up, with long leaps lovely and slow,
Over the stone wall into the wood of hemlocks bowed with snow.

Now lies he here, his wild blood scalding the snow.

How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers
The buck in the snow.
How strange a thing, a mile away by now, it may be,
Under the heavy hemlocks, that as the moments pass,
Shift their loads a little, letting fall a feather of snow —
Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.