TAKING POETRY PERSONALLY

To consider how absorption into a poem’s world works, immerse yourself in two opening stanzas. The first comes from John Crowe Ransom’s most anthologized poem, the elegy “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” first published in 1924:

There was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in her footfall,
It is no wonder her brown study
Astonishes us all.

Ill omen and sweetness balance in this stanza’s contrasts. A light, little body dashes through in the past tense; in the present, she’s shockingly still. The phrase “brown study,” potentially puzzling to contemporary readers, was once shorthand for melancholy reverie but has fallen out of use. Blue is the color of sadness now. Yet even given that hitch in comprehension, this four-line sentence raises suspense that lures a reader into the deep end, inferring that a child has come to harm and wondering how. Helped by references to speed and lightness, the stanza moves.

Next, from a poem by Hai-Dang Phan, with the scholarly title “My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Literature,’ Third Edition (1981)”:

Certain words give him trouble: cannibals, puzzles, sob,
bosom, martyr, deteriorate, shake, astonishes, vexed, ode …
These he looks up and studiously annotates in Vietnamese.
Ravish means cướp đoạt; shits is like when you have to đi ỉa;
mourners are those whom we say are full of buồn rầu..
For “even the like precurse of feared events” think báo trước.

The title and first stanza of Phan’s poem, first published in 2015 and later collected in his 2019 book Reenactments, are longer than Ransom’s, more detailed and precise, conveying an intellectual tone intensified by quotes in Vietnamese and their translations. Despite tonal differences, however, the two poems are kin. “My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Literature’” will eventually reference “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter”—mirror it, in some ways. Each poem concerns memory, mourning, and the fundamental mysteriousness of other people, in their deaths and in their lives.

Phan sets a cooler tone than Ransom, through