SOURCE: Fowler, Douglas. “Ransom's ‘Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter.’” The Explicator 52, no. 2 (winter 1994): 99-101.

In the following essay, Fowler locates the “emotional life” of “Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter” in the comical and enchanting encounter between the geese and the little girl.

Although John Crowe Ransom's “Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter” has been widely admired and anthologized since its publication in 1924, commentators seem to have had difficulty describing, in this instance, the nature of the poet's achievement. For example, Robert Penn Warren (98) speaks somewhat patronizingly of Ransom's “admirable little poem,” praises what he calls its “manly understatement,” and notes mysteriously that “simple grief is not the content of the primary statement” the poem makes—although it is precisely as a statement of grief that readers have received the poem for seventy years.

Vivienne Koch describes the poem simply as a “delicately turned elegy, suffused with affectionate humor” (382), a...