"The Leaden-Eyed" by Vachel Lindsay
"Let not young souls be smothered out beforeThey do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull,...Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,Not that they die, but that they die like sheep."
"The Leaden-Eyed" was written in an entirely different context but fully applies to two young American girls whose lives were literally "smothered out" before they had a chance to reap the joys of life. Their souls were starved by their insensitive worlds, their dreams and gods did not save them.
They didn't die like sheep, either. They died agonizing deaths by hanging themselves by the neck in their homes, the only places they could find succor and safety from the mean world and vicious people in their schools but places that couldn't give them relief from their pain.
It's simplistic to say that 15 year old Phoebe Prince and 17 year old Alexis Pilkington committed suicide. Both girls were the murdered victims of modern life, both suffered far more slings and arrows than they could withstand, both succumbed to sadness beyond redemption or salvation.
A freshman at South Hadley High School in Massachusetts, Phoebe was a recent immigrant to America's soil. The sweet, little Irish lass no doubt viewed her new land and home as a stupendous opportunity to do quaint deeds and fully flaunt her pride.
And then she met head-on the American educational system where detached teachers and administrators turned their backs on her and where student cliques teach more hard lessons than are taught in classroom settings.
One lesson young Phoebe failed to master was the unwritten rules of student life: One does not overstep one's invisible bounds. Unknowingly, she violated the dictates of those rules, dated a senior boy and thereby effectively ended her life.
Hounded and bullied relentlessly on both social interaction websites and in person, physically and mentally harassed and abused both in school and out, called an Irish slut by her peers, she finally went home one cold January day and hanged herself: /9bF4Tm
Phoebe Prince was buried in County Clare in her native Ireland, an ocean away from her torturers. Nine students have now been indicted in conjunction with the case; the faculty member who reportedly witnessed the bullying that day and tacitly condoned it by doing nothing got off scot free.
Pretty and smart, Alexis Pilkington was two years older than Phoebe. Already a troubled girl when she graduated early from West Islip High School on Long Island, Alexis was in counseling and scheduled to attend Dowling College on a soccer scholarship in the fall.
Unlike Phoebe Prince whose tormentors also physically bullied her, Alexis' enemies achieved their goal of driving her to a desperate act exclusively by cyberbullying on Facebook and Formspring.me.
Reports indicate there were other factors that contributed to her depression although the endless attacks on those websites had to have exacerbated her anxious state of mind sufficiently to motivate her to take her own life by hanging herself in her bedroom on March 21st.
Alexis Pilkington's lifeless body was discovered by her 12 year old sister but her death didn't end the harassing, mean-spirited website postings: /bUdkTQ
Suffolk police are investigating.
It's difficult to determine who is more to be pitied, Phoebe Prince and Alexis Pilkington or their deranged tormentors.
May they finally rest in peace.
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