Today’s Poem: Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter

John Crowe Ransom’s poetic self-effacement

Viggo Johansen, The Dead Child, 1881 (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s Poem commemorates the birthday of its author, the Fugitive poet and literary critic John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974). With “Janet Waking” and “Blue Girls,” the 1924 “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” which appeared in a collection of the same year, Chills and Fever, numbers among Ransom’s most famous and anthologized poems. In an era of “I”-driven verse, this poem’s quality of self-effacement may particularly strike us. Though “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” has a single speaker, he has hidden himself among the crowd of mourners, the “we” who are confronted by the awful incongruity of a child’s death. From the first line, everything this speaker declares points outward, away from himself. Beholding the dead child propped in her casket, remembering her in life, he says, at every moment, Don’t look at me. Look there.

John Crowe Ransom in 1941, photograph by Robie Macaulay (Wikimedia Commons)

At the same time, the poem’s perspective remains specific and unsparing. The language in these abab quatrains, with their shifts from tetrameter to trimeter, is as simple and straightforward as a well-cut suit; still the singular rhetoric emerges. The child’s liveliness is figured as warlikeness: “bruiting” her battles against her shadow and against the geese, who don’t fight back but lament (“in goose”), as she herds them into the pond. In death, her unaccustomed stillness is that of one absorbed in her own thoughts, all her outward activity turned inward, her battles ended in unanticipated surrender, her face a “brown study.”

The shocked mourners who behold the child thus are not heartbroken, but “vexed,” a word strange and exact and unsentimentally true. What else should a child’s death evoke, but the sense that something is annoyingly, frustratingly, distressingly wrong? Even as the poem’s speaker points away from himself to speak for the collected mourners, his rhetorical choices speak for him. 

---

Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter 

by John Crowe Ransom 

There was such speed in her little body, 
And such lightness in her footfall, 
It is no wonder her brown study 
Astonishes us all. 

Her wars were bruited in our high window. 
We looked among orchard trees and beyond 
Where she took arms against her shadow, 
Or harried unto the pond 

The lazy geese, like a snow cloud 
Dripping their snow on the green grass, 
Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud, 
Who cried in goose, Alas, 

For the tireless heart within the little 
Lady with rod that made them rise 
From their noon apple-dreams and scuttle 
Goose-fashion under the skies! 

But now go the bells, and we are ready, 
In one house we are sternly stopped 
To say we are vexed at her brown study, 
Lying so primly propped. 

---