Douglas Fowler's commentary [on “Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter”] in the winter 1994 Explicator, citing ironic comedy as Ransom's means of rendering the death of John Whiteside's daughter “wasteful and tragic” (101) without mawkishness, captures the poem's theme but misses its real device for aesthetic control and ignores its major character. The neighbor who narrates the poem sees nothing even remotely comic in the life and death of the child, and he and not the little girl is the protagonist.

The information supplied by Fowler, that the poem was inspired by Ransom's watching a neighbor's daughter playing in leaves, suggests that the poet may have identified with the imagined reaction of his speaker to the sudden death of such a child—a reaction which begins in surprise, switches to a near-sentimental sadness, then culminates in understated anger. The main interest of the poem is not so much the little girl's untimely demise as its effect on this man who barely knew her.

Considering that the narrator had only a casual awareness of the child's existence when she was alive, his reaction to her death is quite strong. His statement that “Her wars were bruited in our high window” marks him as a bit stuffy (“bruited?”), aloof, and possibly even heretofore mildly irritated by the noise below. Now he is struck by the astonishing immobility of the girl's once-speedy “little body.” He is so moved by her death that he recalls with a poet's poignant irony her Edenic child's world of snow-cloud geese and noon apple-dreams, presided over by the shamelessly maudlin “little / Lady with rod.” But while she could take “arms against her shadow,” she was defenseless against the Shadow, and this is the injustice the speaker struggles to understand.

Bittersweet rumination halts with the stark reality of the concluding quatrain. “But now go the bells,” the narrator says glumly, “and we are ready.” He clearly isn't ready psychically, for “In one house we are sternly stopped,” the syllables themselves echoing his jolt at viewing the small corpse. He then utters the poem's key word when he says that he is “vexed,” rather than the conventional “grieved,” at the “brown study” of his neighbor's innocent daughter “Lying so primly propped” in unnatural and final quiescence.

The death of a child is especially sad and bewildering when it comes suddenly, as this one apparently did. Ransom may have chosen a neighbor to narrate the poem so as to diminish the subject's vulnerability to the sentimentality he considered anathema. (The small poem spoken by the little girl's mother or father would be unforgivable if it weren't mawkish.) To Ransom's credit, he did not eschew sentiment along with sentimentality. Though his narrator had no personal stake in the child's life, he is deeply aggrieved by her death and even more profoundly shaken by its cosmic implications. The little girl lost her battle with mortality even before she knew her adversary. The narrator must settle his quarrel with a God he now knows too well as one who lets children die.

Work Cited

Ransom, John Crowe. “Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter,” Poems and Essays. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. 10.