even the bells don't sing her name:
painted in white wash on cotton clouds.
the geese scatter distressed by a
crystal shadow, at best;
a girl in watercolour skirts the grounds.
who is John Whiteside's daughter
what is an elegy without a name
or was grief for her as weightless
as the questions at the end of the chapter:
[can you explain? what was The Poet
trying to say,the Poet who signed
his name to the Poem; for sure
the Poet whose name endures]
what is a watercolour in the rain,
what is a watercoloured name
dissolving here in a close reading
when parents christen even children
dead on arrival
and etch it in stone, the christening name-
if not in marble or the guilded monuments.
she could have been anyone; a tiny doll soldier
in the tomb of an unknown.
well you know, how did her mother feel about that?
does anyone know? that's my question.
did she softly cry not wanting to make a scene
what kind of immemorial poem is this
for my little girl...
the angels took it away with them
(I mean, her name)
leaving behind the funeral train, the flowers;
departing with
her light, her apple white hours
where God,at least, Who knew what to call her,
[Alone, alone...the bells intone: she died alone]
as they say in the South,
called her home
mary angela douglas 10 december 2015
P.S. This poem is written as a response to John Crowe Ransom's poem "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter" which is a strange poem to me and has been for some time much as I generally love his poetry. or rather I love the poet he almost became if he hadn't been engaged in systematically killing his own lyrical tendencies in order to appear a more sophisticated, urbane poet.
I have been vaguely troubled by this poem all my life and only recently figured out what I found distressing. He wrote this poem I guess as an elegy when the young daughter of his friend John Whiteside died. But there is no real feeling of grief for the little girl that died anywhere in the poem that I can see. Maybe it was in the drafts he threw out.
There is just a pretty, generalized water colour though with lovely fairy tale impressions as he recalls seeing her from an upstairs window. That is the one saving grace note in the poem but it exists in isolation from the rest of the poem.
This poem causes me grief every time I read it because the little girl's name is never mentioned in the poem. Even colder, the poem is not even dedicated to her. This to me is going too far in using an event in actual life as a departure point for a poem. Compare the poem with Shelley's elegy for Keats "I weep for Adonis, he is dead o weep for Adonis." and you will see what I mean. Everyone knew he meant John Keats. John Crowe Ransom's poem is tearless. He is "vexed" as one would be vexed by a simple everyday annoyance. What a callous word to use in the context. "vexed" at a small life taken that can never return.
The one lovely fairytale image and I really do love that image of the little girl in a fairytale cloud and the goose speaking alas murmuring alas seems encapsulated in its own fragile bubble vaulted away from the antiseptic, clipped, brittle tone of the rest of the poem. I wish Ransom had made a different poem, one connected to the fairy tale cloud but that seems to be what he was fighting in himself, that unabashed lyricism, bringing it under steely control. Perhaps that's what being a "Fugitive" poet was all about. Fugitive from the beautiful, freely, naturally expressed.
Her "prim study propped" evokes the appearance of a mummy viewed at an archeological dig where certainly no one is thinking of her as someone's daughter, or even child, having been mourned, but just as a museum curio, artifact. You can almost smell the coroded linen.
painted in white wash on cotton clouds.
the geese scatter distressed by a
crystal shadow, at best;
a girl in watercolour skirts the grounds.
who is John Whiteside's daughter
what is an elegy without a name
or was grief for her as weightless
as the questions at the end of the chapter:
[can you explain? what was The Poet
trying to say,the Poet who signed
his name to the Poem; for sure
the Poet whose name endures]
what is a watercolour in the rain,
what is a watercoloured name
dissolving here in a close reading
when parents christen even children
dead on arrival
and etch it in stone, the christening name-
if not in marble or the guilded monuments.
she could have been anyone; a tiny doll soldier
in the tomb of an unknown.
well you know, how did her mother feel about that?
does anyone know? that's my question.
did she softly cry not wanting to make a scene
what kind of immemorial poem is this
for my little girl...
the angels took it away with them
(I mean, her name)
leaving behind the funeral train, the flowers;
departing with
her light, her apple white hours
where God,at least, Who knew what to call her,
[Alone, alone...the bells intone: she died alone]
as they say in the South,
called her home
mary angela douglas 10 december 2015
P.S. This poem is written as a response to John Crowe Ransom's poem "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter" which is a strange poem to me and has been for some time much as I generally love his poetry. or rather I love the poet he almost became if he hadn't been engaged in systematically killing his own lyrical tendencies in order to appear a more sophisticated, urbane poet.
I have been vaguely troubled by this poem all my life and only recently figured out what I found distressing. He wrote this poem I guess as an elegy when the young daughter of his friend John Whiteside died. But there is no real feeling of grief for the little girl that died anywhere in the poem that I can see. Maybe it was in the drafts he threw out.
There is just a pretty, generalized water colour though with lovely fairy tale impressions as he recalls seeing her from an upstairs window. That is the one saving grace note in the poem but it exists in isolation from the rest of the poem.
This poem causes me grief every time I read it because the little girl's name is never mentioned in the poem. Even colder, the poem is not even dedicated to her. This to me is going too far in using an event in actual life as a departure point for a poem. Compare the poem with Shelley's elegy for Keats "I weep for Adonis, he is dead o weep for Adonis." and you will see what I mean. Everyone knew he meant John Keats. John Crowe Ransom's poem is tearless. He is "vexed" as one would be vexed by a simple everyday annoyance. What a callous word to use in the context. "vexed" at a small life taken that can never return.
The one lovely fairytale image and I really do love that image of the little girl in a fairytale cloud and the goose speaking alas murmuring alas seems encapsulated in its own fragile bubble vaulted away from the antiseptic, clipped, brittle tone of the rest of the poem. I wish Ransom had made a different poem, one connected to the fairy tale cloud but that seems to be what he was fighting in himself, that unabashed lyricism, bringing it under steely control. Perhaps that's what being a "Fugitive" poet was all about. Fugitive from the beautiful, freely, naturally expressed.
Her "prim study propped" evokes the appearance of a mummy viewed at an archeological dig where certainly no one is thinking of her as someone's daughter, or even child, having been mourned, but just as a museum curio, artifact. You can almost smell the coroded linen.
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