This is one of those poems that always takes me back to the first time I read it. I first met this poem and “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter" in Dr Louis Cowan's Southern Literature class. I hear it in her voice.
I'm always struck most by the phrase "deep dynastic wound."
For me the shifts in tone capture keenly a particular experience of being on the outside of grief looking in and the uncomfortable doubleness of vision that occurs when one's primary experiences of the deceased person have been largely negative. The narrator has that ironic distance, born of his outsider status and yet a deep compassion for those who mourn.
Yes, there's something a little melodramatic about the mother's grief-- something that reminds me a bit of Mrs Musgrove in Persuasion mourning her dead Dick. And yet as a mother myself, her grief still moves me. He may have been a sword in her heart, but he was *her* sword. And her heart is breaking now.
I've not read much of Ransom's work and this is new to me. Fascinating -- thank you for such a helpful explication. It makes me sad, both for the death and the family mourning the boy, and for the way he was perceived (and maybe was) when he was alive.
In its way a haunting poem. I think some of his reserve comes from the knowledge that his Northern readers won’t care one bit about Virginia’s traditions. He tricks us into caring anyway.
I have long liked JCR, who specialises in this sort of ironic distancing. As I recall, he kept nothing or next to nothing from his collection of 1919 (published when he was 31), and his best poems appear in the next decade. After this, he revised some of his early poems, but wrote no new poetry.
There is another poem about the death of a child, placed at the funeral. I think by Dylan Thomas? Quite moving. When I was an ESL teacher at a community college, I worked through it with a student from Ghana who came to the tutoring center.
The Thomas that comes to mind is his "Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," but that's not set at the funeral. Though it's a powerful poem.
Beneath the tone shifts, I can hear a deep compassion for the family's lost future. When our nephew died this summer soon after his wedding, one of my conversations with my bereaved brother was about this - the loss, the never-to-be-ness of children and their children, a potential branch of an already small family broken off.
The guy could write poetry.
This is one of those poems that always takes me back to the first time I read it. I first met this poem and “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter" in Dr Louis Cowan's Southern Literature class. I hear it in her voice.
I'm always struck most by the phrase "deep dynastic wound."
For me the shifts in tone capture keenly a particular experience of being on the outside of grief looking in and the uncomfortable doubleness of vision that occurs when one's primary experiences of the deceased person have been largely negative. The narrator has that ironic distance, born of his outsider status and yet a deep compassion for those who mourn.
Yes, there's something a little melodramatic about the mother's grief-- something that reminds me a bit of Mrs Musgrove in Persuasion mourning her dead Dick. And yet as a mother myself, her grief still moves me. He may have been a sword in her heart, but he was *her* sword. And her heart is breaking now.
I've not read much of Ransom's work and this is new to me. Fascinating -- thank you for such a helpful explication. It makes me sad, both for the death and the family mourning the boy, and for the way he was perceived (and maybe was) when he was alive.
In its way a haunting poem. I think some of his reserve comes from the knowledge that his Northern readers won’t care one bit about Virginia’s traditions. He tricks us into caring anyway.
I have long liked JCR, who specialises in this sort of ironic distancing. As I recall, he kept nothing or next to nothing from his collection of 1919 (published when he was 31), and his best poems appear in the next decade. After this, he revised some of his early poems, but wrote no new poetry.
There is another poem about the death of a child, placed at the funeral. I think by Dylan Thomas? Quite moving. When I was an ESL teacher at a community college, I worked through it with a student from Ghana who came to the tutoring center.
Could it be Seamus Heaney's Mid-Term Break about the death of his younger brother?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57041/mid-term-break
Yes, thank you. That's the one. Very deep.
The Thomas that comes to mind is his "Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," but that's not set at the funeral. Though it's a powerful poem.
Beneath the tone shifts, I can hear a deep compassion for the family's lost future. When our nephew died this summer soon after his wedding, one of my conversations with my bereaved brother was about this - the loss, the never-to-be-ness of children and their children, a potential branch of an already small family broken off.
"Beneath the tone shifts, I can hear a deep compassion for the family's lost future."
That's precisely my reaction.
Which kind of ties in with his vision of the decay of the South.