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? 

Sharon Olds' "Victims": Again, Sympathy vs. Judgment

Tilt

Cormorant

The Victims by Sharon Olds












Sharon Olds’ “The Victims” is another poem about the death of a character who is problematic for the speaker.

 (Here I confess I feel a little silly insisting on the distinction between author and speaker, since Sharon Olds created an entire book of poems about her troubled relationship with her father. However, if even one of a poem’s details is fictional or unverifiable, I think it justifies the convention of separating author from speaker or narrator.)

Sharon Olds call her speaker’s character into question much more than John Crowe Ransom did in “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” (my last post). Olds is willing to speak ill of the dead. In fact, she might revel in it.  

Therefore, is sympathy vs. judgment (again, see the July 24 Banjo52) the main tension in which are we caught in “The Victims,” or are both the speaker and her father likely to elicit more judgment than sympathy?

Remember, “sympathy” is not pity, which is condescending. Sympathy is a feeling of connection to, identification with, even respect for that other character—whom we find appealing in some way, perhaps to our alarm.

The Victims by Sharon Olds

Asymmetry

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