JOHN CROWE RANSOM’S “BLUE GIRLS”

I’ve postponed posting John Crowe Ransom’s “Blue Girls” because I assumed a lot of people would scream “Sexist!” and be done with it. And I’d get it. Add that to his being a father of The New Criticism and the dubious, perhaps supercilious attitude I hear in his “Janet Waking” and “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” and I wondered if another Ransom poem would be worth the bother. 

(http://banjo52.blogspot.com/search?q=janet+waking  http://banjo52.blogspot.com/search?q=bells+for+john+whiteside%27s+daughter

But I’ve always liked “Blue Girls,” as many teachers secretly might, given its first two stanzas about students. Of course, any teacher—or any adult over 40—can grump about heedless youth. 

Blue Girls

Twirling your blue skirts, traveling the sward

Under the towers of your seminary,

Go listen to your teachers old and contrary

Without believing a word.

Tie the white fillets then about your hair

And think no more of what will come to pass

Than bluebirds that go walking on the grass

And chattering on the air.

Practise your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;

And I will cry with my loud lips and publish

Beauty which all our powers shall never establish,

It is so frail.

For I could tell you a story which is true;

I know a lady with a terrible tongue,

Blear eyes fallen from blue,

All her perfections tarnished—yet it is not long

Since she was lovelier than any of you.

John Crowe Ransom  http://www.poemtree.com/poems/BlueGirls.htm

It’s in Stanza 3 where “Blue Girls” becomes especially interesting to me. Who else would have thought to speak of publishing young women’s unspeakable beauty, or publishing any great beauty? Is publishing what one does with or to beauty? Yet, why not?

Who would think to rhyme “publish” and “establish”?  (Granted, the abba rhyme scheme can take some credit for leading Ransom to that, but he allowed himself to be so led).  And who would think to mix that academic language with the soulful and visceral “I will cry with my loud lips . . .” to extol major but frail human, transient beauty?

 

I think Ransom's warning in the last stanza is powerful, but in Literature Land there are many powerful warnings about the pitfalls of aging along with the vanity and heedlessness of youth. It’s Ransom’s unexpected and meaningful combinations in the third stanza that are special here, and their plaintive earnestness prevents me from leaping hastily to unpleasant conclusions about the poem or the poet.

How about you? Is there something to forgive or merely overlook in Ransom? If so, do you?