And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel

For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover

The cry of quail and the whirling plover

And the blind eye creates

The empty forms between the ivory gates

And smell renews the salt savor of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth

The place of solitude where three dreams cross

Between blue rocks

But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away

Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still

Even among these rocks,

Our peace in His will

And even among these rocks

Sister, mother,

And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,

Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

John Crowe Ransom

OHN CROWE RANSOM was born in Pulaski, Tennessee, April 30, 1888, of ScotchIrish descent. Pulaski, so Ransom states, is otherwise distinguished as being the County Seat of Giles County, the deathplace of Sam Davis, the Confederate martyr, and of the Ku Klux Klan. (Ransom's own great-uncle took part in the foundation of the latter.) Ransom, the son of a local minister, was educated in his own state and abroad: he received his B.A. at Vanderbilt University in 1909, his B.A. at Oxford in 1913. At the latter he was Rhodes Scholar from Tennessee, taking the "Greats" (classical) course. He taught at Vanderbilt from 1914 until he 1937; then transferred to Kenyon College, Ohio, where he founded The Kenyon Review. He was the chief instigator and one of the founders of The Fugitive, that experi mental journal which did much to disprove Mencken's contention that the South was a vast "Sahara of the Beaux Arts." Although Ransom is realistically aware that the past is past, he cannot help yearning for a vanished richness, for an agrari

anism that cannot be and a culture that never was.

Poems About God appeared in 1919, a raw first book with a tang of bitter humor. Here was no southern gentleman's proverbial courtliness, no unctuous and mincing

gallantry; here was a bristling acerbity blurted in a strong if uncertain utterance, The lines range from the roughly powerful (reminding one of a coarser Robert Frost) to the surprisingly banal. During the five-year interval between Poems About God and his next volume, Ransom's poetry underwent an almost complete change. Little of the crudeness remains in Chills and Fever, by all odds the most distinguished volume of poetry published in 1924. Ransom, it was evident, reacted from the callow simplicities and the tradition of Wonder in words of one syllable; his verse is definitely for mature minds willing not only to allow a mature poet his mixed modes but willing to follow them. It is, at first glance, a curiously involved speech which Ransom uses to clothe his semi-whimsical, semi-ironic philosophy. But beneath his precise circumlocutions one is made aware of an extraordinarily sensitive lyricist. What adds zest to his verses is the mocking gravity of his speech-a gravity which is sometimes exaggerated to the verge of parody, if a philosopher can achieve that dubious art.

Ransom strikes his note with a sureness that is almost defiant. He is witty, but his wit is strengthened by passion; he turns from dialectical fencing to sudden emotion. Surprise is his forte; he can weave patterns that are, at one time, fanciful and learned. His account of a small boy's walk in deep woods ("First Travels of Max") is as fine a macabre piece as anything achieved by Amy Lowell. He can draw portraits of dream-lost mediocrities as sympathetically as Robinson, "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son" being a second cousin to "Miniver Cheevy" and "Bewick Finzer." He can sound the mordant brasses in "Captain Carpenter," the muted violins in "Here Lies a Lady" and the prophetic trumpets in "Spiel of the Three Mountebanks" with equal precision. "Parting Without a Sequel" is memorable in its combination of emotion and mockery. "Piazza Piece" is, perhaps, the most characteristic of these poems; in a sonnet balanced as a lyric Ransom has revitalized— and localized-the old theme of Death and the Lady.

Such music, half soothing, half stinging, is new in our poetry; the modulations are strange, the cadences charming in their slight irregularities. Ransom knows how to employ the unresolved suspension; he delights in pairing such slant rhymes as "drunkard-conquered," "little-scuttle," "ready-study." But it is not merely the free use of dissonance and assonance which distinguishes his poems; it is what he does with these properties. "Antique Harvesters" breathes the very quixotic spirit of the old South and the Southron's devotion to that spirit; "Lady Lost" is a perfect harmonizing of teasing and tenderness; "Janet Waking" uncannily mingles sympathy and mock pathos.

Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927) has the fresh combination of cavalier grace and surprising savagery uttered in a precise softness of speech, But the surprise is not only occasioned by his tempo which is both nervous and drawling. As Mark Van Doren wrote, "He has been at pains to salt his rhymes and pepper his diction with fresh, realistic words; he has wrenched his cadences to fit his wayward thought; he has written with an original and almost acid gayety."

Yet, for all of Ransom's variety, in spite of his ability to play equally well in the spangles of harlequin and the graver habit of Kapellmeister, this Southerner will never be a popular poet. His is too elegant a speech to meet with general favor; his vocabulary is meticulous to the point of being overelaborate, his utterance is often so finical as to seem pedantic. The fact that a great part of this particularity is

not affectation, but a scholar's gentle mockery, will not save him from the disapproval or the neglect of the public which dreads polysyllabic poets. Nor can one blame the common reader. Several of Ransom's poems lose themselves in ellipses and remote allusions, a few are so rarefied as to be unintelligible without footnotes and a chart of cross-references. His later work is both a growth and a departure. Such poems as "Prelude to an Evening," with its overtones of domestic worry, and "Painting: a Head" are a far cry from the philosophic-fanciful tone of "Here Lies a Lady.” In this more difficult poetry Ransom seems to be hesitating between a veiled romanticism and an almost abstract intellectuality.

Nevertheless, even in a facile, overproductive age, there can be no doubt that these crisp narratives and teasing lyrics will find their niche. It will be neither a mean nor a long neglected one. Ransom has developed a new tone without straining for novelty; he has become an influence without becoming oracular. If the chief characteristic of Ransom's verse is irony, as Cleanth Brooks has pointed out, "it remains an instrument-it never becomes a mere attitude adopted by the poet for its own sake."

The combination of elegance and honesty which distinguishes Ransom's verse is even more striking in his prose. It characterizes God without Thunder (1930), which Ransom called an unorthodox defense of orthodoxy; his contribution to the agrarian symposium in I'll Take My Stand (1930); The World's Body (1938), a collection of animated literary studies; and The New Criticism (1941), an analytical examination of the critical theories of I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, Yvor Winters, and William Empson.

BELLS FOR JOHN WHITESIDE'S DAUGHTER

There was such speed in her little body,

And such lightness in her footfall,

It is no wonder that 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.

LADY LOST

This morning, there flew up the lane
A timid lady-bird to our bird-bath
And eyed her image dolefully as death;
This afternoon, knocked on our windowpane
To be let in from the rain.

And when I caught her eye

She looked aside, but at the clapping thunder

And sight of the whole earth blazing up like tinder Looked in on us again most miserably,

Indeed as if she would cry.

So I will go out into the park and say,
"Who has lost a delicate brown-eyed lady
In the West End Section? Or has anybody
Injured some fine woman in some dark way,
Last night or yesterday?

"Let the owner come and claim possession,
No questions will be asked. But stroke her gently
With loving words, and she will evidently
Resume her full soft-haired white-breasted fashion,
And her right home and her right passion."

BLUE GIRLS

Twirling your blue skirts, traveling 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 lustrous 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 lady with a terrible tongue,

Blear eyes fallen from blue,

All her perfections tarnished-and yet it is not long Since she was lovelier than any of you.

HERE LIES A LADY

Here lies a lady of beauty and high degree.

Of chills and fever she died, of fever and chills,

The delight of her husband, her aunts, an infant of three,
And of medicos marveling sweetly on her ills.

For either she burned, and her confident eyes would blaze,
And her fingers fly in a manner to puzzle their heads-
What was she making? Why, nothing; she sat in a maze
Of old scraps of laces, snipped into curious shreds—

Or this would pass, and the light of her fire decline

Till she lay discouraged and cold as a thin stalk white and blown, And would not open her eyes, to kisses, to wine.

The sixth of these states was her last; the cold settled down.

Sweet ladies, long may ye bloom, and toughly I hope ye may thole,

But was she not lucky? In flowers and lace and mourning,

In love and great honor we bade God rest her soul

After six little spaces of chill, and six of burning.

JANET WAKING

Beautifully Janet slept

Till it was deeply morning. She woke then
And thought about her dainty-feathered hen,
To see how it had kept.

One kiss she gave her mother,

Only a small one gave she to her daddy

Who would have kissed each curl of his shining baby;
No kiss at all for her brother.

"Old Chucky, Old Chucky!" she cried,

Running on little pink feet upon the grass

To Chucky's house, and listening. But alas,
Her Chucky had died.

It was a transmogrifying bee

Came droning down on Chucky's old bald head
And sat and put the poison. It scarcely bled,
But how exceedingly

And purply did the knot

Swell with the venom and communicate

Its rigor! Now the poor comb stood up straight
But Chucky did not.

So there was Janet

Kneeling on the wet grass, crying her brown hen