“Here Lies a Lady” (1924), a piquant commentary on the clash of reason and sensibility, displays Ransom’s early vigor and the focal themes of his later works. The speaker, as though reciting an old English ballad, speaks in four-line stanzas composed of five beats per line and rhyming abab, cdcd, efef, ghgh. In line 16, the peculiarities of the lady’s demise are neatly summarized: Her last days were marked by twelve episodes, six of depression and six of manic passion. Speaking through the mask of a courtly gentleman, the poet remains involved and yet detached by ordering the four verses with mathematical precision: one to begin the eulogy for the fallen aristocrat, a beloved family-centered woman; two to describe alternating fever and chills; and a fourth addressed to survivors. In mock antique language, the speaker wishes for all “sweet ladies” a balance of bloom and languor. With self-serving irony, he demands, “was she not lucky?” a moot point in the greater question of a promising life plagued by troubles and prematurely snuffed out.
From the same period, “Philomela” is charmingly set in traditional iambic pentameter (five-beat lines) rhymed abbaa and falling away on the last line of each stanza to three beats. Its text draws on a disturbingly tragic pair of myths that Ovid, a major classic poet from the early days of the Roman Empire, states in Book 6 of his Metamorphoses. Unlike most of Ransom’s verse, the eight-stanza narrative is a personal statement that recalls his graduate days at Oxford and subsequent return to the United States to write in classical mode. His doubts about American readers appears in line 37, “I am in despair if we may make us worthy,” a true question of the nation’s capacity for traditions that date to Greek mythology. For all its ponderous diction and mock-serious tone, the poem sets in verse one of the concerns of the Fugitives, who doubted that a bustling country absorbed in industrial and commercial progress was capable of a parallel development of the arts.
“Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” (1924), one of modern poetry’s unflinching perusals of hard-edged reality, sets out with a courteous, subdued tone and veiled dismay to observe traditional rituals honoring a little girl’s passing. The syntax is precise, the imagery lighthearted, yet compelling as the poet surveys the unnatural reserve of a formerly boisterous child. Speaking as a mourner reconciling the perversely mannered stillness of a corpse laid out for burial, the poet can’t resist visions of past rascality as she “bruited” backyard wars and, in a pastoral setting, shadow-fenced against her own image. As though unable to allay the grief, the poet hears the honk of the tricky, sleepy-eyed geese calling “alas,” an archaism and stylistic connection to chivalric romance.
Deeply respectful of custom, Ransom, speaking from the point of view of a Southern gentleman, controls his probing paradox, carefully rhyming abab and guiding line lengths to four beats. Even the title resists harsher diction, substituting “bells for” as an indicator of death. As though tipping his hat to the inevitable, he lops off the fourth line of each stanza to dimeter or trimeter. Allusions to death are numerous, but restrained—the shadowed adversary, the whitening of grass with snowy feathers, and the irony of a “tireless heart” and “noon apple-dreams,” now permanently frozen in time.
Like an overly fastidious adult, the speaker searches for the appropriate terms to fix on the child’s unusual torpor. The incongruity of her pose vexes a mind that once demanded ladylike behavior in place of willful caprice. Now, the swift-footed Miss Whitesides is forever forced into a “prim [propping],” another euphemism for death. The formerly durable “little body”—a phrase that allies the double meaning of human frame and corpse—takes on an unnatural reverie, a rigid “brown study” that astonishes with its finality.
“Piazza Piece” (1925), a model of quiet formality, demonstrates Ransom’s mastery of the fourteen-line Petrarchan sonnet. The poet follows a tight pattern of rhyme, meter, and thought development. He transcends these mechanics by judicious enjambment, which carries over from line to line significant statements, in particular, the focus of the lady’s dalliance, “waiting / Until my truelove comes.” His rhymes vary masculine and feminine forms, the monosyllabic small/all, moon/soon and the less importunate falling away of trying/sighing/dying. By repeating end words at the beginning and closing of the octave and sestet, he effectively separates the paired statements as though sculpting two figures in confrontation.
Heavily emphasizing the differences in age, the speaker, Ransom’s famous “gentleman in a dustcoat,” bears the civility and demeanor of a courtly male forced into the role of traducer of beautiful young womanhood. Soon to turn to dust, the lady, idealized in speech and intent, refuses to listen to insistent warnings of mortality from the “grey man.” Her vaudevillian reply is the standard line of the stalked virgin. Beneath a frail trellis, symbol of a human effort to shape nature, she stands at the height of loveliness and fools herself into believing that human hands can stay death’s menace.
Published in 1927, “Janet Waking,” a frequent companion piece to “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” conveys in seven stanzas the poet’s ironic commentary on a child’s initiation into the finality of death. The title indicates a duality: The main character awakens to search for her hen and is unceremoniously awakened to loss. Like Little Miss Muffet or Goldilocks, Janet appears one-dimensional in her goodness as she kisses mother and daddy, then displays another side of her personality, a childish orneriness toward a brother, an obvious rival. Summoning her pet, she learns the particulars of its death, killed by a bee enhanced to mock epic proportions by the fearful adjective “transmogrifying.” The crucial fourth stanza spills over into the fifth as enjambment continues the details of a purple rising and the pseudo-humorous conclusion that the topknot rose, “But Chucky did not.”
In imitation of fable, the crux of the poem turns on “So” at the beginning of stanza six as the poet guides the dramatic situation to a jarring moral. Baffled that Chucky no longer can “rise and walk,” Janet overtaxes her breathing with a flow of tears. With typical girlish petulance, she begs for adults to revive Chucky and rejects the obvious conclusion that there are laws of nature that humans cannot override. As though tiptoeing past a poignant and private scene, the poet softens his rhymes to breath/death, sleep/deep, an acknowledgement of Janet’s painful turning away from babyhood.
A contemporary of “Janet Waking,” Ransom’s “The Equilibrists,” a 56-line mock chivalric narrative, moves back in time with Tennysonian archaisms and Arthurian characters drawn from the tragic love of Tristan and Isolde. In a peculiarly sanitized study of lovers’ obsessions, the poet relies on syntactic inversions—”traveled he,” “mouth he remembered,” and “came I descanting”—and the high-sounding diction of “jacinth,” “stuprate,” “orifice,” “saeculum,” and “beseeching” to distance viewer from object. Like an accounting of feminine anatomy in the erotic verse of the Song of Solomon, the speaker inventories the white-armed beauty’s loveliness in metaphors: “grey doves” for eyes, “officious tower” for mind, and “lilies,” a quaint substitute for breasts.
As the compelling iambic pentameter couplets press on, the crux arises in line 21—”Predicament indeed, which thus discovers / Honor among thieves, Honor between lovers”—as though man, woman, and the personified abstraction Honor were elements of a stylized love triangle. The speaker toys with the lovers’ choices. He muses on the precarious balance of physical attraction held off by high ideals and enhances the standoff with a metaphysical conceit—the farfetched notion of binary stars held in a twirling dual orbit, at once locked in near-embrace and forever imprisoned out of reach by centrifugal force. Like stars, they burn with unrequited love.
Ransom makes a clear break with myth in line 33 to ponder the Christian overtones of the lovers’ quandary. Like St. Augustine, they must decide whether to burn or burn in hell—to suffer thwarted passion or be damned eternally for consummating it. From the Christian point of view, the poet acknowledges that eternity lacks the combustible “tinder” (a pun on “tender”) and inflaming lechery. After death, flesh is “sublimed away” as heaven refines the liberated spirit. Those “great lovers” who acquiesce to their desires spend the afterlife in tormented embrace. Like predators, their disintegrating bodies forever tear at each other.
Out of awe and reverence for the “equilibrists,” the speaker is unable to retreat from their cosmic dance—forever untouching, but linked in a fiery, yet decorous attraction. In a final gesture to their exquisite torment, the speaker offers an epitaph typical of ancient Roman tombstones in its apostrophe to the passing stranger. Although decayed to mold and ash, the lovers remain inextricably locked in a virginal mockery of coupling, their chastity preserved by obedience to purity. For the speaker, their supine splendor is both “perilous and beautiful.” For the modern reader, however, their contretemps suggests a cosmic puzzle, an academic paradox that forever teases without hope of solution.
