Today’s Poem of the Day, anticipating the April 30 birthday of its author, the Fugitive poet John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974), numbers among Ransom’s most famous and anthologized poems. With “Janet Waking” and “Blue Girls,” it’s one of those poems that emblematize Ransom as poet — but what is it, exactly, that distinguishes them as the work of this poet and no other?

Perhaps it’s their very quality of self-effacement that makes Ransom’s poems unusual, particularly for contemporary readers acclimatized to solipsistic, “I”-driven verse. Though “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” has a single speaker, he has hidden himself among the crowd of mourners, the “we” who are confronted by the awful incongruity of a child’s death. From the first line, everything this speaker declares points outward, away from himself. Beholding the dead child propped in her casket, remembering her in life, he says, at every moment, Don’t look at me. Look there.

But this voice is hardly anonymous. Though the language in these abab quatrains, with their three lines of tetrameter and one of trimeter, is as simple and straightforward as a well-cut suit, still the singular rhetoric emerges. The child’s liveliness is figured as warlikeness: “bruiting” her wars against her shadow and against the geese, who don’t fight back but lament (“in goose”), as she herds them into the pond. In death, her unaccustomed stillness is that of one absorbed in her own thoughts, all her outward activity turned inward, her battles ended in unanticipated surrender.

The shocked mourners who behold her thus are not heartbroken, but “vexed,” a word strange and exact and unsentimentally true. What else should a child’s death evoke, but the sense that something is annoying, frustratingly, distressingly wrong? 

Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter 
by John Crowe Ransom 
 
There was such speed in her little body, 
And such lightness in her footfall, 
It is no wonder her brown study 
Astonishes us all. 

Her wars were bruited in our high window. 
We looked among orchard trees and beyond 
Where she took arms against her shadow, 
Or harried unto the pond 

The lazy geese, like a snow cloud 
Dripping their snow on the green grass, 
Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud, 
Who cried in goose, Alas, 

For the tireless heart within the little 
Lady with rod that made them rise 
From their noon apple-dreams and scuttle 
Goose-fashion under the skies! 

But now go the bells, and we are ready, 
In one house we are sternly stopped 
To say we are vexed at her brown study, 
Lying so primly propped. 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.