Blue Girls

      He's fairly-regularly reviled these days as one of the, if not THE, proponent of the so-called New Criticism -- of which Northrop Frye once fliply suggested that the reason it was "new" was because it had only been around since Plato-- but John Crowe Ransom was often a better poet than he is often now credited for being. Skimming through a few volumes today, I landed on this poem which has a kinder, gentler Yeatsianism about it:

Blue Girls Twirling your blue skirts, travelling the sward Under the towers of your seminary, Go listen to your teachers old and contrary Without believing a word. Tie the white fillets then about your hair And think no more of what will come to pass Than bluebirds that go walking on the grass And chattering on the air. Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail; And I will cry with my loud lips and publish Beauty which all our power shall never establish, It is so frail. For I could tell you a story which is true; I know a woman with a terrible tongue, Blear eyes fallen from blue, All her perfections tarnished -- yet it is not long Since she was lovelier than any of you. --- 1927

Click here to listen to "Blue Girls" and here to read a short biography of Ransom.

Ah, yes, it's the sort of poem feminists loathe-- one of those "You may be pretty now but you'll be old and bitter soon" poems-- and I think loathe unfairly. But you have to admire Ransom's technique here. His sense of a line is impeccable: the breaks are pretty much perfect, and his cadences are impressive. Notice how the phrase "blue girls" provides its own kind of apostrophic caesura in its line, keeping the surrounding parts of the instruction from being pretentious; it injects a kind of wistfulness into the line, a spondee in a field of iambs. The rhymes work wonderfully well, too-- not too heavy, not forced at all. The last stanza works suprisingly well, considering that once one hits the word "true" one knows what the poem's final word will be. But Ransom's deftness with pacing, I think, saves it: instead of keeping the quatrain structure, he stretched it out to allow the intercessionary (and semantically and rhythmically misleading) "blue" to deflect attention from the poem's otherwise telegraphed direction. This is also the sort of poem that would be well-suited to getting the uninculcated into poetry, its lyrical action clear rather than enigmatic, its musical qualities palpably lilting even for the most tone-deaf ear. I'd add Ransom to the list of poets who warrant reconsideration. Reconsideration, that is, when our concerns in the academic and reading worlds are more interested in the poetic than the political and ideological. This is a good poem to set out before a bunch of undergraduates to gauge their responses. I'm willing to bet that most, if not all, of those that disliked the poem would be objecting to its subject rather than its technique, or its poetic qua poetic qualities. I'm thinking more and more that it's necessary to expose the extent to which people young and old are judging literature based on their own assumptions rather engaging a work on its own terms; that is, to expose the polemicists and the ideologues for what they more often than not are, talkers rather than listeners.

      Dare I note, too, that it it's also a poem worth faxing to Britney Spears. I'm not sure if she could read it, but....