John Crowe Ransom, "Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter": Sympathy vs. Judgment and the Dramatic Monologue

Agrarian Movement

Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter by John Crowe Ransom : The Poetry Foundation

I've thought several times of posting John Crowe Ransom's elegant poem, "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter," but each time I hesitated to post something as dark as the death of a child. I've also wondered if Ransom's formalism and air of southern gentility on the subject might feel alienating or even offensive. For no particular reason, I've decided today to post it anyway.

I've admired the poem for many years, and I think Ransom's inability or unwillingness to express more than vexation in such a situation is painfully honest, if not consoling. Shall we require the speaker to roll on the ground, spew tears, gnash teeth, and wail skyward? Is there one right way to do death?

Or, coming at it from the other direction, how many of us are willing to say of any recently deceased person that we didn't much like her. In this case, the Whiteside child was something of a pest--nothing criminal, nothing serious, just an annoying little human, maybe trying to pass for a charming belle-to-be, and that makes it diffiicult to go through the formal motions of mourning without being dishonest. In the end, all we can say is that we are "vexed." The decedent's youth dramatically increases the tensions among acceptable shows of emotion, ceremonious restraint, and honest feelings or thoughts.

Ceremonious Restraint

The poem's rhyme and meter invest in the speaker an additional stiffness, which may get in the way of our liking him. We might be close to the situation Professor Robert Langbaum describes in The Poetry of Experience and his study of dramatic monologues. In the end, readers are likely to find themselves in a tension between sympathy and judgment. We sympathize with the speaker in that we are drawn to him; as our equal or in some way our superior, we find him appealing. Maybe he is smart or charming or silver-tongued. For whatever reason, we find ourselves liking and respecting the speaker.

We don't pity or condescend to him; instead, Langbaum's "sympathy" means we feel some affinity or sense of identification with him. At the same time, however, we want to, need to judge him, almost always on moral grounds, or in something like a moral context. He is engaged in something (act, deeds, words, thoughts) we find wrong, or at least suspicious, ethically uncomfortable. So we are caught in a genuine tension, and the poem leaves us there rather than resolving the conflict, especially if resolution would have meant some facile swooping in of gods, heroes, resolving platitudes, or some such.

Though unnamed, the speaker in "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter" might be called an identifiable character in an identifiable situation, like a scene from a play (hence "dramatic" monologue). However, the poem lacks an identifiable listener and therefore does not technically fit the genre of dramatic monologue. (By the way, Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" and Tennyson's "Ulysses" are two of the most famous dramatic monologues, as is T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," although both speaker and listener are Prufrock, as he thinks to himself en route to a taking of tea).

However, Langbaum's tension between sympathy and judgment is likely by the end of "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter," and so much the better, I say. The situation is full of complexity, and the speaker's manner and content both add to that. There is probably no right way to mourn any death and be honest with ourselves. Ransom makes us re-discover that, makes us feel it, makes us squirm. That's not bad for a 20-line poem.

Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter by John Crowe Ransom : The Poetry Foundation