Comparing 2

Comparing "Bells For John Whiteside’s Daughter" And "Dead Boy" Essay, Research Paper


Vivienne Koch (1950)


Ransom begins to take possession of another order of the fabulous. This is the fable of


childhood, childhood viewed as


innocence, as a necessary condition to knowledge which corrupts, and which is difficult


and tragic in its essence. The ultimate,


permissive grace given to this kind of knowledge is most luminous in later poems like


"Dead Boy" and "Janet Waking." Here,


the clearest exposition is in the much-admired "Bells for John Whiteside’s


Daughter."


Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (1958)


The idea of death coming to little children is a theme of several Ransom


poems. In "Dead Boy" the family gathers about the


corpse of a dead child, "the little man quite dead." The frequently anthologized


"Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter" depicts a


little girl "lying so primly propped."Graham Hough


Beneath the more reticent and allusive poems in the selected edition are


the same foundations as those of Poems About God.


But the tone has changed. Resignation, acceptance are not the appropriate words. The world


is what it is, and the powers that


rule it. There is no use saying any more about that, directly. It is only the reflections


of this uncompromising actuality in various


facets of various human lives that Ransom’s poetry feels called upon to deal with. Usually


small facets. His poetry delights in


putting massive and ineluctable facts in small or delicate settings. The child learns


about death, the most massive and ineluctable


fact she will ever have to learn, through the death of her pet hen. It is a group of


chattering schoolgirls who are presented with


the picture of blear-eyed decrepitude. The justly famous "Bells for John Whiteside’s


Daughter" presents the whole of insatiable


youthful vitality in the recollection of the little girl harrying the geese round the


pond, and the whole incredible outrage of its


extinction in the picture of her still lifelike little body in its coffin. But there is no


more troubling deaf heaven with bootless cries.


The facts being as they are it is more bearable to look at them in cross-lights than full


face–as in "Dead Boy," where the pathos


of the child’s death is approached only by contrasting the mother’s grief with the far


from lovable nature of the boy in life, and


both are subordinated to the deep dynastic wound suffered by the old family. Yet these


small, pathetic, and understated deaths


are the same Death as that of the hired man in "Grace," dropping among his vomit


under the killing sun, for which the speaker


arraigned his God.


from "John Crowe Ransom: The Poet and the Critic." Southern


Review (1965).


Cary Nelson


One might innocently assume satire was at work in opening John Crowe


Ransom’s Selected Poems and discovering the titles


he gave to its two main sections: "The Innocent Doves" and "The Manliness


of Men."’ It does not take long, however, before


one realizes that these categories are meant seriously, despite his wry tone and bemused


perspective on all human endeavor. In


the 1924 poem "Miriam Tazewell" a woman weeps when a thunder storm breaks and


afterward walks out to see "her lawn


deflowered." Apparently this is the sort of sophomoric joke Ransom imagines his male


readers enjoying together. It seems to


her "the whole world was villain, / The principle of the beast was low and


masculine." In "Lady Lost," first published in 1925, in


which a bird serves as a figure for all women, the speaker asks "h

as anybody /


Injured some fine woman in some dark way?" If


so, it represents no real problem:


Let the owner come and claim possession,


No questions will be asked. But stroke her gently


With loving words, and she will evidently


Return to her full soft-haired white-breasted fashion


And her right home and her right passion.


His poems are full of foolish girls and worldly men. When Ransom’s men


commit errors of pride, the price paid is manly and


imposing: solid oaks split, winter storms strike, or battlefields are strewn with dead.


Ransom’s women flirt and flutter and give


themselves over only to romance or its rejection. Despite all this, his sexism is not


unselfconscious. It is rather a deliberate and


witty effort to articulate what he sees as the differences between men and women. Yet of


all the well-known modern American


poets his oeuvre may be the most thoroughly constituted by misogyny, for his whole poetic


project is founded on an


exaggerated and absurdly stereotypical view of sexual difference. Subtract these views and


there are few poems left, no career


to speak of remaining. Nonetheless, the poems are too intricately crafted, their diction


too surprising, for Ransom’s sexism to


warrant simple outrage. And often enough the rhetoric of his wit offers pleasures that


counter the pettiness of his subject matter


and his attitude toward it. But his career is finally wholly circumscribed by cliches


about men and women that he could not see


beyond.


A conservative reader might attempt to defend Ransom by noting that some of the more


condescending poems are written to


young girls, not mature women, but the effect of his Selected Poems, which mixes poems


devoted to women of a variety of


ages, is to make older women and young girls interchangeable. The additional poems in his


individual books, moreover, add


significantly to the sense that a frustrated idealism underlies a generalized misogyny in


his work.


Although one would not know it from the surface of Ransom’s poems, for example, their


constitutive rage at women is again


historically grounded. In Ransom’s despair at the changes he saw in the country and in his


regret at the passing of the old South


is also a distress about destabilized gender relations. In Ransom we see how condescending


idealization can evolve into an


oppressive but deceptively elegant system of gender differentiation. It is a model of


sophisticated prejudice that no nonpoetic


discourse could give us in such perfected form.


In "The Cloak Model"’ a young man is described (by an older speaker) as


imagining that a woman’s "broad brow meant


intelligence," that "her fresh young skin was innocence, / instead of meat that


shone." The older man draws his attention to


"God’s oldest joke, forever fresh; / The fact that in the finest flesh / There isn’t


any soul." "The Cloak Model" was not reprinted


in Ransom’s Selected Poems, but there too sexual difference is pervasively, if often less


blatantly, constitutive. "Dead Boy," for


example, mourns the loss of a complex, ambiguous, individual human being; "Bells for


John Whiteside’s Daughter," on the other


hand, mourns an empty, unspecific feminine innocence: "We are vexed at her brown


study / Lying so primly propped."


Moreover, the male child is taken as a figure for the ambivalent status of southern


history and culture; the female child is


decisively other. In the very inescapability of its obsessions, Ransom’s poetry in turn


can help us to focus on the politics of


sexual difference in modern poetry in general.


Copyright ? 1999 by Cary Nelson

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