'practice your beauty, blue girls'

[subtle1science]

I've just read a dreadful poem by John Crowe Ransom, entitled "Blue Girls."  It's not that it's badly written--it's exceptionally well written, in fact.  It's the message....

Twirling you blue skirts, travelling the sward
Under the towers of your seminary,
Go listen to your teachers old and contrary
Without believing a word.

Tie the white fillets then

Comments

[suo_gan]

Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;
And I will cry with my loud lips and publish
Beauty which all our power shall never establish,
It is so frail.

For I could tell you a story which is true;
I know a lady with a terrible tongue,
Blear eyes fallen from blue,
All her perfection tarnished--and yet it is not long
Since she was lovelier than any of you. So, if I'm correct, one of the messages of this poem is beauty is external, and one's outward beauty seems to feed the inner self, making the older woman not only a hag, but a sharp tongued one as well. Reminds me of the dolt I sat with when I was a software engineer who said, in all seriousness, that when he gets married, he would divorce his wife if she got fat or developed breast cancer. I hope he's sitting alone right now with a wife who came equipped with airpump and patches. Same goes for that poet. Funny and sad how the most misogynist views can be couched in perfect poetic form

[subtle1science]

Ghastly poem, isn't it? It sounds so...nice. And the message is revolting: only a woman's exterior beauty matters; once she loses that, she has nothing...especially if, somewhere along the line, she developed intelligence

[suo_gan]

As much as I love the HP series, I also have to admit that the women characters are not as fully realized as the male ones. It's an excellent observation that we know little about Hermione, and so have little invested in her relationship with Ron, and I'm not speaking shippers here, but the careful reader

[rattlesnakeroot]

The line that really gets me is:

And think no more of what will come to pass
Than bluebirds that go walking on the grass

Ugh - clearly his stereotypes are showing, and it's also part of that generation's view that women need to be taken care of because they "don't have a thought in their pretty little heads."

I had a professor (a poet) who liked John Crowe Ransom and he had that same attitude that women couldn't be real grown-ups in the same way that men were. I hate to say it, but it's also an ingrained Southern attitude, patriarchal nonsense.

[subtle1science]

One of the greatest delights of the Moffat era has been the characterization of middle-aged women....How refreshing that they don't have to be hags--and what a sad commnetary it is that I can be grateful for that simple fact......