Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter by John Crowe Ransom

First published: 1924; collected in Chills and Fever, 1924

Type of poem: Elegy

The Poem

“Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” is a short funeral poem in five quatrains. Through a series of restrained images, John Crowe Ransom transfixes the grief of the entire community over the inexplicable death of a young girl. He accomplishes this primarily by refusing to admit to the fact of death. The speaker of the poem, representing the community, merely declares perplexity at the little girl’s sudden inactivity.

The first stanza uses the past tense to refer to the girl’s former busy activity, then leads to contemplation of her current, mystifying “brown study” (an old-fashioned term for rapt daydream). This attitude suggests that her stillness is unnatural, even perverse—as if she were going through one of those childish stages so incomprehensible to the adult world. This fixity contradicts her former habit of action. Yet this is fitting, for the death of children perplexes the standard assumptions of the adult world for the next generation. Faced with that reversal, spectators can only stop and stare, dumbfounded.

The following three stanzas are run together, one leading immediately to the next, to form a unit commemorating the girl’s activities. Ransom uses language that elevates the girl’s games, giving them public status and the remoteness of romance. In this way, Ransom creates the impression that the townspeople watched this outdoor playing and projected into it their hopes for the future. For example, instead of simply playing war games, she “takes arms against her shadow.” Then, those were games of life and death; now, she casts no shadow.

Her major campaigns, however, were waged against the geese that usually inhabited the orchard. These geese occupy the entire third stanza. Ransom paradoxically shows them driven into activity by the girl. Previously the geese possessed the undifferentiated shapelessness of a cloud; now they become a troop of individualists, each reacting in its own way to the driving energy of the girl. She arouses them from their “noon apple-dreams” induced by feeding on windfalls and scatters them in a frenzy of motion.

The engine that drives this activity is the girl’s “tireless heart,” which ironically has stopped beating. The phrase also suggests the essential innocence of this type of play. It is the kind of thing a good-hearted person does—the kind of play that prepares for and initiates the activities of adulthood.

This leads to the final stanza, which returns to the basic paradox: This girl will never reach adulthood. In language that becomes hard-edged and stark, Ransom returns from reverie about the past to the reality of death. This death stops the breath of the entire community. It seems profoundly wrong. The body lies “primly propped,” unnatural in death—forced out of its usual motion, fixed in the brown study it had not known in life. The community is “vexed” at the senseless perversity of this death.

Forms and Devices

The two major techniques used by Ransom in “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” are formal diction and understatement, and both work together to reinforce the theme of the poem. Both appear in the title: Instead of “elegy,” “lament,” or even a more emotive term to announce his subject, Ransom simply uses “bells.” This establishes a formal response to an intense emotional situation; it also suggests the futility of any human restitution for this loss. Together, these devices generate the irony that pervades the poem. John Whiteside’s daughter is dead, and all one can do is offer the empty gesture of a solemn funeral.

Both devices are used to weave the body of the poem. The first stanza contrasts the former “lightness in her footfall” with her present “brown study,” which “astonishes us all.” Each of these phrases is either formal or old-fashioned, the language of the older generation left to account for this loss. Again, this generates a fundamental irony: Parents are not supposed to bury their children. The language accentuates this. “Lightness” can suggest emptiness or insubstantiality, reminding readers that those footsteps will never fall again. “Footfall” should refer only to an adult, which this little girl will never become. Further, in life she never would have chosen the rapt, meditative state of brown study. She is in such a state now against her will, and the elders can only stare open-mouthed.

Ransom compounds the ironies in the central section of the poem. The little girl’s play activities are described in the terminology of an epic or of a high romance, both old-fashioned conventions. The line “Her wars were bruited in our high window” creates a formal frame about her actions, as if forming a heraldic emblem. The girl’s play takes place in an orchard, a region of fertility—no place to memorialize the deeds of the dead before their time. In the orchard, the girl “took arms against her shadow,” a phrase that again uses formal terminology inappropriate for one whose combats were innocent, not life-threatening. Nevertheless, these battles seem to have taken her life, and the reader remembers that she now casts no shadow.

The central image within the body of the poem is the girl’s driving of the flock of geese, contrasting their pointless somnolence with her directed activity. This interaction is described, as before, in formal, understated terms that generate irony. The geese are an undifferentiated, impersonal mob compared with the girl’s intense personality. They are an amorphous “snow cloud,” made to cry “in goose” and “scuttle/ Goose-fashion” by the “little body” with the “tireless heart.” She is a champion in a war against geese, victor in a trivial mock-epic, made more trivial because that heart has now stopped.

The final stanza announces the bells and ends with a concluding static image of the community “sternly stopped” and “vexed.” It is stopped in several ways. The girl’s activity—and that of the younger generation—is at a standstill. The routine activities of the town are broken for the funeral. The heart of the community has been taken out. Ransom uses subtle fractures of rhyme and rhythm patterns throughout the poem to underscore this sense of the expected order being frustrated in the death of a child.

Bibliography

Brooks, Cleanth. “John Crowe Ransom: As I Remember Him.” American Scholar 58, no. 2 (Spring, 1989): 211-233.

Cowan, Louise. The Fugitive Group: A Literary History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959.

Howard, Maureen. “There Are Many Wonderful Owls in Gambier.” Yale Review 77 (Summer, 1988): 521-527.

Malvasi, Mark G. The Unregenerate South: The Agrarian Thought of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.

Modern American Poetry Web site. “John Crowe Ransom.” http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m‗r/ransom/life.htm.

Quinlan, Kieran. John Crowe Ransom’s Secular Faith. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr. “The Wary Fugitive: John Crowe Ransom.” Sewanee Review 82 (1974): 583-618.

Young, Thomas Daniel. Gentleman in a Dustcoat: A Biography of John Crowe Ransom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976.