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John Whiteside's Daughter

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The Innocent Death “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” (1924) by American author John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974), is a poem that has five sets of stanzas with four lines in each which are usually called quatrains--a rhyme scheme is in each quatrain as well. The poem deals with a group of neighbors at a funeral dealing with the sudden death of a young girl. Ransom’s main point is that death can be an unexpected, merciless, and permanent event and to show how fragile life can be. The speaker is one of the neighbors of the recently deceased young girl. The character who speaks in the poem does not have a clear gender; therefore, this character will be referred to as a male, for clarity. He is speaking to the neighbors who have gathered at …show more content…

He then says that her current unmoving posture is stunning everyone attending the funeral. He recollects back to how the neighbors used to hear the young girl loudly fighting her shadow from their homes. The young girl would also go down to the pond and harass geese. The geese would be sleeping around the pond until the young girl came running towards them. The geese would be “like a snow cloud” as their white feathers would be scattered all across the green grass. The geese would run around and try to trick the little girl as she chased them. The geese would be crying “Alas” in their goose talk because of the little girl’s endless assault. Her “tireless heart” woke all the geese from their “apple-dreams” and made them fly away to the sky. The speaker then comes back to the present to mention that the church’s bells are ringing and it is time to lay the girl to rest. The poem ends with him saying that at even though the little girl is laying there so very “primly propped.” They all are still disturbed or “vexed” by her current …show more content…

It is easy to ignore the possibility of our friends or family dying at any moment or day. Death always seems categorized with a person being of older age. If an elderly person passes away from a disease or an organ failure in a hospital, it is expected. If a little girl is murdered or died in an accident; then it is an unforeseen tragedy. When at a funeral, the friends and relatives of the deceased all think about the same thing. The memories of the past clash with the reality of the present. They wonder how a person who was previously so full of life and character--now a motionless corpse being placed in a dark hole. The realization that this person will never be seen or interacted with ever again is emotionally crushing. Even if it can be a difficult event to endure, death is an essential part of the cycle of life. Nobody lives forever. Everything must come to an end at some

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