A note about Ransom
So, one of John Crowe Ransom's most haunting poems to me is "Vision by Sweetwater." I'm not sure it's as good as "Janet Waking," "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter," or "Piazza Piece," but it strikes a deep cord. It starts rather innocently:
Go and ask Robin to bring the girls over
To Sweetwater, said my Aunt; and that was why
It was like a dream of ladies sweeping by
The willows, clouds, deep meadowgrass, and the river.
Someone is being asked to brings the girls over to Sweetwater, but how you read the narrator radically changes the poem. I know that some critics have read it as a young boy who awakens to sexuality. And this can be somewhat convincing, after all he notices the "lily daughter" who "tinkled light." But I suspect the narrator is more of a collective presence, an archetypal witness perhaps in a violation scene that recurs over and over.
Let them alone, dear Aunt, just for one minute.
Till I go fishing in the dark of my mind:
Where have I seen before, against the wind,
These bright virgins, robed and bare of bonnet.
In this third stanza, we have a shift in the second line. The narrator remembers something in the "dark" of the mind. The women are described as "virgins, robed." It might be a stretch, but I imagine these women as vestal virgins, though we don't need to go as far back as that.
The last stanza focuses on an act, but we are left without details about it.
Myself a child, old suddenly at the scream
From one of the white throats which it hid among?
The scream apparently voids the child's innocence, but we go straight from child to old, as though the scream just needed to jog experience. And the scream, it come from the maidens. Is it violence against them? I read it as such, especially with all the hinted sexual references earlier in the poem, but I am not really sure. It feels like something comes up in the dark of our collective human experience in this poem.
Go and ask Robin to bring the girls over
To Sweetwater, said my Aunt; and that was why
It was like a dream of ladies sweeping by
The willows, clouds, deep meadowgrass, and the river.
Someone is being asked to brings the girls over to Sweetwater, but how you read the narrator radically changes the poem. I know that some critics have read it as a young boy who awakens to sexuality. And this can be somewhat convincing, after all he notices the "lily daughter" who "tinkled light." But I suspect the narrator is more of a collective presence, an archetypal witness perhaps in a violation scene that recurs over and over.
Let them alone, dear Aunt, just for one minute.
Till I go fishing in the dark of my mind:
Where have I seen before, against the wind,
These bright virgins, robed and bare of bonnet.
In this third stanza, we have a shift in the second line. The narrator remembers something in the "dark" of the mind. The women are described as "virgins, robed." It might be a stretch, but I imagine these women as vestal virgins, though we don't need to go as far back as that.
The last stanza focuses on an act, but we are left without details about it.
Myself a child, old suddenly at the scream
From one of the white throats which it hid among?
The scream apparently voids the child's innocence, but we go straight from child to old, as though the scream just needed to jog experience. And the scream, it come from the maidens. Is it violence against them? I read it as such, especially with all the hinted sexual references earlier in the poem, but I am not really sure. It feels like something comes up in the dark of our collective human experience in this poem.
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