I promised we’d come back to John Crowe Ransom so here is another of his elegies for dead children (cf. week 50), and again it is something of a puzzle to me, not because of any difficulty with the meaning, but because one feels that Ransom’s slightly archaic style, fastidious to the point of preciousness, like a man handling words with white gloves, simply should not work as well as it does, especially for a subject of such pathos. Yet somehow those cadences mesmerise.
Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter
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.
John Crowe Ransom