Dead Boy

THE little cousin dead, by foul subraction,

A green bough from Virginia's aged tree,

And none of the county kin like the transaction,

Nor some of the world of outer dark, like me.

A boy not beautiful, nor good, nor clever,

A black cloud full of storms too hot for keeping,

A sword beneath his mother's heart -- yet never

Woman bewept her babe as this is weeping.

A pig with a pasty face, so I had said,

Squealing for cookies, kinned by poor pretense

With a noble house. But the little man quite dead,

I see the forbears' antique lineaments.

The elder men have strode by the box of death

To the wide flag porch, and muttering low send round

The bruit of the day. O friendly waste of breath!

Their hearts are hurt with a deep dynastic wound.

He was pale and little, the foolish neighbors say;

The first-fruits, saith the Preacher, the Lord hath taken;

But this was the old tree's late branch wrenched away,

Grieving the sapless limbs, the shorn and shaken.

John Crowe Ransom

Winter Remembered

TWO evils, monstrous either one apart,

Possessed me, and were long and loath at going:

A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart,

And in the wood the furious winter blowing.

Think not, when fire was bright upon my bricks,

And past the tight boards hardly a wind could enter,

I glowed like them, the simple burning sticks,

Far from my cause, my proper heat and center.

Better to walk forth in the frozen air

And wash my wound in the snows; that would be healing;

Because my heart would throb less painful there,

Being caked with cold, and past the smart of feeling.

And where I walked, the murderous winter blast

Would have this body bowed, these eyeballs streaming,

And though I think this heart's blood froze not fast

It ran too small to spare one drop for dreaming.

Dear love, these fingers that had known your touch,

And tied our separate forces first together,

Were ten poor idiot fingers not worth much,

Ten frozen parsnips hanging in the weather.

John Crowe Ransom

Necrological

THE friar had said his paternosters duly

And scourged his limbs, and afterwards would have slept;

But with much riddling his head became unruly,

He arose, from the quiet monastery he crept.

Dawn lightened the place where the battle had been won.

The people were dead -- it is easy he thought to die --

These dead remained, but the living were all gone,

Gone with the wailing trumps of victory.

The dead men wore no raiment against the air,

Bartholomew's men had spoiled them where they fell;

In defeat the heroes' bodies were whitely bare,

The field was white like meads of asphodel.

Not all were white; some gory and fabulous

Whom the sword had pierced and then the grey wolf eaten;

But the brother reasoned that heroes' flesh was thus.

Flesh fails, and the postured bones lie weather-beaten.

The lords of chivalry lay prone and shattered.

The gentle and the bodyguard of yeomen;

Bartholomew's stroke went home -- but little it mattered,

Bartholomew went to be stricken of other foemen.

Beneath the blue ogive of the firmament

Was a dead warrior, clutching whose mighty knees

Was a leman, who with her flame had warmed his tent,

For him enduring all men's pleasantries.

Close by the sable stream that purged the plain

Lay the white stallion and his rider thrown,

The great beast had spilled there his little brain,

And the little groin of the knight was spilled by a stone.

The youth possessed him then of a crooked blade

Deep in the belly of a lugubrious wight;

He fingered it well, and it was cunningly made;

But strange apparatus was if for a Carmelite.

Then he sat upon a hill and bowed his head

As under a riddle, and in deep surmise

So still that he likened himself unto those dead

Whom the kites of Heaven solicited with sweet cries.

John Crowe Ransom

Conrad in Twilight

CONRAD, Conrad, aren't you old

To sit so late in your mouldy garden?

And I think Conrad knows it well,

Nursing his knees, too rheumy and cold

To warm the wraith of a Forest of Arden.

Neuralgia in the back of his neck,

His lungs filling with such miasma,

His feet dipping in leafage and muck:

Conrad! you've forgotten asthma.

Conrad's house has thick red walls,

The log on Conrad's hearth is blazing,

Slippers and pipe and tea are served,

Butter and toast are meant for pleasing!

Still Conrad's back is not uncurved

And here's an autumn on him, teasing.

Autumn days in our section

Are the most used-up thing on earth

(Or in the waters under the earth)

Having no more color nor predilection

Than cornstalks too wet for the fire,

A ribbon rotting on the byre,

A man's face as weathered as straw

By the summer's flare and winter's flaw.

John Crowe Ransom