SOURCE: Coulthard, A. R. “Ransom's ‘Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter.’” The Explicator 54, no. 2 (winter 1996): 94-5.

In the following essay, Coulthard argues that the protagonist of “Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter” is not the young girl, but the girl's neighbor and narrator of the poem.

Douglas Fowler's commentary [on “Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter”] in the winter 1994 Explicator, citing ironic comedy as Ransom's means of rendering the death of John Whiteside's daughter “wasteful and tragic” (101) without mawkishness, captures the poem's theme but misses its real device for aesthetic control and ignores its major character. The neighbor who narrates the poem sees nothing even remotely comic in the life and death of the child, and he and not the little girl is the protagonist.

The information supplied by Fowler, that the poem was inspired by Ransom's watching a neighbor's daughter playing in leaves, suggests that the poet may have identified...