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. I finally figured out what bothered me about Ransom's poem. 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. There is just a pretty, generalized water colour though with lovely fairy tale impressions as he recalls seeing her from an upstairs window. 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. 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 sophisticated 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.
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.
You can find John Crowe Ransom's Poem "Bells For John Whiteside's Daughter" online. You cannot find the name of the daughter of John Whiteside online. Well, I couldn't. And I really wanted to find it because I wanted with all my heart to dedicate this poem to her and to her mother both of whom were somehow shut out of John Crowe Ransom's abstractions though he might not have meant that to
happen. Also, of course, "marble or the guilded monuments" is a direct reference to the Shakespeare sonnet.
In Ransom's poem the word "vexed" to describe the feelings of the viewers on seeing her in the casket is monstrous. "Vexed' is English indicates mild annoyance, superficial annoyance. In the face of the death of this very individual little girls very real death the use of the word 'vexed" is monstrous. I do not understand how this poem could be so widely praised; it is his most famous poem and studied for decades in all even basic anthologies of literature from Jr. High School onward.
