Janet Waking by John Crowe Ransom
"Janet Waking" is a poem by John Crowe Ransom that explores themes of childhood innocence, loss, and the transition to a more complex understanding of life. The poem is structured in seven stanzas, each consisting of four lines that follow an abba rhyme scheme, which serves to enhance its lyrical quality. It begins with a vivid portrayal of a young girl, Janet, awakening and engaging in her morning thoughts, particularly concerning her pet hen, which has recently died—a pivotal moment that marks the loss of innocence.
The narrative is presented from the father's perspective, who observes Janet's innocence and is ultimately confronted with his own powerlessness in the face of her grief. This juxtaposition of the idyllic, fairy-tale-like setting with the harsh reality of death creates a poignant tension throughout the poem. Ransom employs various literary devices, including allusion and juxtaposition, to reflect the duality of childhood and the inevitable encroachment of reality.
As the poem progresses, it captures the profound emotional shift in Janet as she grapples with understanding death, signifying her movement from a sheltered existence to a more nuanced awareness of life's complexities. With careful attention to language and form, "Janet Waking" encapsulates the universal experience of coming to terms with loss, making it a compelling read for those interested in themes of childhood, familial bonds, and the confrontation with mortality.
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Subject Terms
Janet Waking by John Crowe Ransom
First published: 1926; collected in Two Gentlemen in Bonds, 1927
Type of poem: Lyric
The Poem
“Janet Waking” is in seven stanzas, four lines each, with the first and fourth lines rhymed and the second and third lines rhymed (abba rhyme scheme). The title suggests the coming of age theme that is evident in the poem. As is true of any moment of understanding in the works of John Crowe Ransom, the formal constraint of the tight form reinforces the recognition of people’s position in the larger universe: operating within a strict schema and perceiving the abstraction and formlessness of the universe (“far beyond the daughters of men”). The poem is written from the point of view of the father, “Who would have kissed each curl of his shining baby.” He is the only adult whose thoughts the reader is given. Beginning as an observation of a beloved child and including the first-person perspective in the final verse paragraph (“Janet implored us”), the poem moves from the intensely personal to the universal.
“Janet Waking” begins with a scene familiar to any parent. Ransom’s poem follows the child through her morning rituals. The complication is suggested in the opening lines when the child, thinking of her pet hen, wants “To see how it had kept.” The end of the third stanza informs the reader that the hen had died. The centerpiece of the poem is the fourth stanza, in which the bee sting is described, a stanza in which Ransom juxtaposes a “transmogrifying bee” and “Chucky’s old bald head,” foreshadowing the final change in the poem: The parents’ change from seeming all-powerful to being all too weak.
The structure of the poem suggests a brief play in which the opening scene shows the protagonist waking and thinking “about her dainty-feathered hen.” The second scene introduces the rest of the characters—the father, mother, and brother. Then, as the setting shifts outside the house to the farmyard, death and danger are revealed in the death of the pet, the tragic force in this brief drama. In drama, the “catastrophe” marks the tragic failure and comes as a natural consequence of the death. In this case the child’s innocence and belief die. She no longer believes that her parents are all-powerful because they cannot bring her pet back to life.
The poem’s narrative structure leads the reader to experience the frustration and powerlessness of the parent watching the child and being unable to help. The father and child in this small drama are at the mercy of larger forces—forces that they begin to understand through experience.
Forms and Devices
Throughout “Janet Waking,” language and situation bespeak the fairy-tale quality of the work. One important device in the poem is allusion. “Beautifully Janet slept” recalls the innocent sleep of Snow White and Rose Red. The child wakes not merely to full sun but to a time that is “deeply morning.” “Beautifully” and “deeply” suggest the rhythm and the tone of fairy tales. The fairy-tale motif continues as the father notes that he “would have kissed each curl of his shining baby.” Just as the sun sets out on a new day, so does the child of this fairy-tale farm world. The phrase “Running across the world upon the grass” also locates the child in the land of fairy tales. That which intrudes upon her world is “the forgetful kingdom of death.” The archaic term “alas” also suggests a past time, a fairy-tale world.
Another important device is juxtaposition. The poem juxtaposes realism with innocence and idealism. To the little girl, the pet is “her dainty-feathered hen.” In the father’s description, the chicken has an “old bald head.” “Janet Waking” also juxtaposes formal diction with simple and direct Anglo-Saxon English. Ransom’s choice of “transmogrifying” to describe the bee forces a reader—even a casual reader—to recognize unwitting power. Just as the venom of the bee communicates its rigor, so does the word “transmogrify” communicate the status of the event. The pathos of the unsuspecting victim is heightened by the description of the bee “droning down on Chucky’s old bald head.” Chucky, bald, is unprotected, vulnerable to the remorseless and methodical bee.
A juxtaposition that further exemplifies the duality of this poem appears in the final two lines of the fifth stanza: “Now the poor comb stood up straight/ But Chucky did not.” With humor, Ransom balances the tension and sadness of the poem, again with realism intruding on any romantic description. Ransom shelters the reader from the harshness of death and destruction with his naming the pet “Chucky” and with these final lines of the fifth stanza.
A third device is enclosure. Each of the stanzas rhymes in an abba pattern, implying a close relationship between each of the rhymed words, with the closest relationships being those that function as internal couplets. For instance, when in the second stanza Ransom introduces the family in rhyme, lines five and eight rhyme “mother” and “brother”; lines six and seven less exactly rhyme “daddy” and “baby.” The mother and brother complete the family, but in this poem they serve merely to enclose what is the closest relationship: the father and daughter. The final stanza serves as another readily accessible example of the relationship between rhyme and meaning. Ransom rhymes “breath” and “death” in the opening and closing of the concluding stanza, enclosing rhymes of “sleep” and “deep.” The child’s breath itself is ragged and painful, breath with the rhythm of weeping, because she has seen death. The child wants death to be sleep, so the pet will awaken, but the death sleep is too deep. The knowledge that some sleep is not beautiful, that some sleep is deep, the sleep of death, is reflected in the rhyme.
Ransom provides another fine enclosure for the poem itself: “deeply” in line 2 and “deep” in the penultimate line of the poem. Ransom describes a circumstance in which the truth is beyond a reader’s understanding, too deep. As Ransom notes, the brown hen has been “translated far beyond the daughters of men” and is therefore beyond the understanding of the child and ultimately of any observer.
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.