Today’s Poem: Street Light
John Crowe Ransom’s moral nightfall
Street Light
by John Crowe Ransom
The shine of many city streets Confuses any countryman; It flickers here and flashes there, It goes as soon as it began, It beckons many ways at once For him to follow if he can. Under the lamp a woman stands, The lamps are shining equal well, But in her eyes are other lights, And lights plus other lights will tell: He loves the brightness of that street Which is the shining street to hell. There’s light enough, and strong enough, To lighten every pleasant park; I’m sorry lights are held so cheap, I’d rather there were not a spark Than choose those shining ways for joy And have them lead me into dark. ═══════════════════════
Today’s Poem, by the Fugitive poet John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974), forms the centerpiece of a sequence of three poems in the same form, near the beginning of the 1919 Poems About God. In 1919, Ransom had only recently returned from the First World War to his English Department post at Vanderbilt University, where he would teach and befriend such notables as Allen Tate (whose “Ode to the Confederate Dead” was yesterday’s poem here) and Robert Penn Warren. He had not yet written the poems for which we most remember him, including “Dead Boy” and “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” which have appeared here at Poems Ancient and Modern.
Yet in that early verse triptych — “Moonlight,” “Street Light,” and “Darkness” — each in three sestets, each stanza rhymed on its even-numbered lines, already Ransom was probing the sense of decline and fall that haunts those later poems. As their titles suggest, these three poems examine qualities of light, or the lack thereof, and the possibilities implicit in each representation of light or darkness.
In the first poem, “Moonlight,” the weird transfiguring illumination of the moon covers sins and keeps secrets — but opens at least an illusory way of escape from the soul’s darkness. In “Darkness,” which closes the sequence, the rainy gloom of a moonless night disorients the traveler, who longs to go home but finds himself in a biblical outer darkness, where “Lost men shall wail and teeth shall gnash.” Of the lightning, the slow-arriving dawn, and the “yellow lamp” brought by a lover, only one light “shall avail,” unfailingly — if it comes.
Today’s Poem, “Street Light,” forms the triptych’s centerpiece. Here, the locus has shifted from the chancy moonshine on the lake to the strangeness of city streets, made visible by an utterly different kind of light. The artificial lights don’t transform or conceal reality so much as they simply dazzle and “confuse” the “countryman,” presumably the “I” of the preceding poem, presented now in third person and out of his natural element.
The rhyming end-words in this stanza signal the subject’s progress into what seems to him to be a world of infinite possibilities: countryman/began/can. The beckoning of so many simultaneous, contradictory possibilities foreshadows the disorientation of the following poem, “Darkness,” but as the eye moves from the first to the second stanzas of “Street Light,” the disorientation becomes far more clearly moral, in a way that explains the homelessness of the subject in the sequence’s final poem.
In this second stanza — again, a tetrameter sestet, rhymed abcbdb — the focus narrows in on a single person, the woman standing “under the lamp.” That line, beginning on a trochee rather than an iamb, commands our attention. The woman to whom the meter directs us here might be any woman, though it’s difficult not to assume that she’s a prostitute, a lost soul caught in the soulless maze of streets. Her eyes refract whole sequences of light, like a house of mirrors offering the illusion of more streets, more possibilities. The “he” who beholds her loves that “brightness,” but it is the light of “the shining street to hell” — a trajectory mirrored by the sequence of rhymes, from well to tell to hell.
The poem closes in a stanza meditating on the “cheapness” of these myriad, bedazzling lights and the way that they “lead” the lost countryman. Again, as in the previous stanzas, the rhyming end-words of the even-numbered lines — park/spark/dark — seem to flash like misleading guide-lights, pointing the wandering man only toward exile, in the third poem’s outer darkness.
Lovely analysis and introduction to a poem I didn't know.