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.