John Crowe Ransom’s Innocent Doves

​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 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.

Practise your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;
And I will cry with my loud lips and publish
Beauty which all our powers 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. (1)

It could rightly be said that I am presumptuous in taking on a critique of John Crowe Ransom’s “Blue Girls,” a poem I never tire of reading. As an adult returning to finish her college studies a while back, I was told by one of my professors that I didn’t quite seem to “get” poetry—and I certainly did not “get” the likes of Edward Estlin Cummings. On the other hand, I am confident that I do understand Donald Davidson and Poe. Though Ransom is, I believe, much more of a challenge than they, I attempted this short review anyway with a little help from Robert Penn Warren.


Ransom’s Blue Girls are “innocent doves,” those who are, in the words of Warren, “the victims of the world, who suffer without knowledge, without philosophy, in the world.”(2) This poem is much more than an admonition to “gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” as I have heard it suggested. It is isn’t trite, mawkish. And neither is the narrator, in my opinion, a man as some have said. The speaker is referring to herself in the third person when she tells the girls, “I know a lady with a terrible tongue….Blear eyes fallen from blue.” She is an aging woman with “loud lips,” that is, garishly painted to mask the effects of time but also a woman shrilly reminding those pretty and self-assured coeds that their day is, sure enough, coming.


I believe that Ransom’s young ladies—silly as jay birds—would have been well advised to have listened to their teachers though “old and contrary”—the latter word having two meanings: in one sense ornery, in another, at odds with ephemera. The professors, had the carefree coeds heeded them, would have imparted some wisdom which might have sustained them when they were no longer secure in their beauty and youth, which even as they twirled their skirts and giggled in their coteries, were fading fast.


I once posted some lines from “Blue Girls” in the chatroom of a radio talk show hosted by a British mystery writer for the most part unacquainted with Southern culture. She was, however, fascinated by what some of her American listeners had to say on the subject. Normally sedate, self-possessed, after she read my post out loud, her voice indicated that Ransom’s words had caught her off guard, had greatly affected her. JCR’s not lapsing into treacly sentimentality concerning the coeds or the crone observing them, makes the poem all the more moving.

​
Warren called Ransom “a master of the withheld effect that unleashes a power at the very end….” And regarding “Blue Girls” and JCR’s “Janet Waking,” RPW vowed that “it would be hard to think of a poem superior to these in perfection of control and clarity of emotional outline.” There is much more to say about Ransom’s poetry, but I will leave that to the likes of Warren and other Southern literary greats.

1 This version of “Blue Girls” is the one included in Ransom’s Two Gentlemen in Bonds, published in 1927.
2 Robert Penn Warren, “Notes on the Poetry of John Crowe Ransom at His Eightieth Birthday,’ Kenyon Review, Summer 1968, Vol. XXX, No.3.