Today’s Poem: Dead Boy

Their hearts are hurt with a deep dynastic wound

Käthe Kollwitz, Woman with a Dead Child, 1903 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Dead Boy

by John Crowe Ransom

The little cousin is dead, by foul subtraction,
A green bough from Virginia’s aged tree,
And none of the county kin like the transaction,
Nor some of the world of outer dark, like me.
 
A boy not beautiful, nor good, nor clever,
A black cloud full of storms too hot for keeping,
A sword beneath his mother’s heart — yet never
Woman bewept her babe as this is weeping.

A pig with a pasty face, so I had said,
Squealing for cookies, kinned by poor pretense
With a noble house. But the little man quite dead,
I see the forbears’ antique lineaments.

The elder men have strode by the box of death
To the wide flag porch, and muttering low send round
The bruit of the day. O friendly waste of breath!
Their hearts are hurt with a deep dynastic wound.

He was pale and little, the foolish neighbors say;
The first-fruits, saith the Preacher, the Lord hath taken;
But this was the old tree’s late branch wrenched away,
Grieving the sapless limbs, the shorn and shaken.
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After we read the death of Little Nell (“No sleep so beautiful and calm”) and the passing of Paul Dombey (“I hear the waves! what the waves were always saying”), what remains for literature to say about the death of children?

There’s mockery of the sentimentality (of the kind, say, attributed to Oscar Wilde). There’s embrace of the sentimental thought (as in Leigh Hunt’s 1840s essay “The Deaths of Little Children,” where the child “is rendered an immortal child. Death has arrested it with his kindly harshness, and blessed it into an eternal image of youth and innocence”). There’s even the twee (which has always bothered me in, say, the 1985 “Little Elegy” by X.J. Kennedy, a poet I much admire: “Shelter now Elizabeth / And, for her sake, trip up death”).

Our sometime contributor Adam Roberts recently praised Matthew Arnold’s 1853 poem “Requiescat” for finding its way past the traps that threaten obituary verse about children: “Strew on her roses, roses, / And never a spray of yew!” But Today’s Poem finds another path — the unlikely path of irony, which makes it a very strange poem.

And yet, a powerful poem. Written by John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974), “Dead Boy” was first collected in his 1927 volume Two Gentlemen in Bonds. It relates the observations of a man, shirttail kin to one of Virginia’s old First Families, who has come to the funeral of his distant cousin: a boy who had been the direct heir to the family line.

The diction — as always with Ransom — moves the reader in disconcerting ways. The ironic and distancing phrasing of the first stanza is almost unbearable. The poem (pentameter quatrains, rhymed abab) offers as its first rhyme subtraction and transaction, as though we were observing a commercial exchange, from the viewpoint of someone not close to the family — but we are given pause by the biblical phrasing Ransom chooses to describe his narrator, a man of “outer dark” (where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth”).

In the second stanza we learn that the unnamed child was a boy “not beautiful, nor good, nor clever” — a reversal of the traditional praise of the child that’s in, for example, Arnold’s “Requiescat” and even Ransom’s own 1924 “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter.” And yet again we have biblical-sounding phrasings — “cloud full of storms” and “sword beneath his mother’s heart” — that seem to cut against the sardonic observation. Then the ironic description returns with “never / Woman bewept her babe as this is weeping,” and we are knocked into uncertainty about how to take the poem.

The third stanza is even worse: the harshest description of the little boy (a pig “with a pasty face, . . . / Squealing for cookies”) who ill-matches his noble ancestors — followed by a reversal to the little man whose corpse shows his “forbears’ antique lineaments.”

John Crowe Ransome in 1941 (Wikimedia Commons)

By the fourth stanza much of the irony seems to have fled. There are still Ransom’s strange phrasings: “box of death” for coffin, “send round / the bruit of day” for engage in small talk. (Interestingly, Ransom also uses the unusual bruit in “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter.”) But there is some actual admiration, or pity, for the old men of the family, described with words that suggest their decisive, active characters, men who “have strode . . . the wide flag porch.” Fading now, of course: “Their hearts are hurt with a deep dynastic wound.”

In the final stanza we learn the distant cousin’s conclusion about the scene. The neighbors are foolish to indulge the sentimental child-death pablum of “He was pale and little.” The preacher is wrong to apply the graveside platitudes of “The first-fruits” that “the Lord hath taken.” The truth is that “this was the old tree’s late branch wrenched away,” which grieves “the sapless limbs” of the dynasty’s old men, leaving them “shorn and shaken.”

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