An Analysis of Ransom’s “Piazza Piece”
Poetry is a condensed form of language. It says very much in very few words.
The ways that make possible this “linguistic economy” are many. Let us take John
Crowe Ransom’s “Piazza Piece” for example and see the various ways in which the
poet has managed to enrich his meaning. Here is the text of the poem:
Piazza Piece
--I am a gentleman in a dustcoat trying
To make you hear. Your ears are soft and small
And listen to an old man not at all;
They want the young men’s whispering and sighing.
But see the roses on your trellis dying
And hear the spectral singing of the moon;
For I must have my lovely lady soon,
I am a gentleman in a dustcoat trying.
--I am a lady young in beauty waiting
Until my truelove comes, and then we kiss.
But what grey man among the vines is this
Whose words are dry and faint as in a dream?
Back from my trellis, Sir, before I scream!
I am a lady young in beauty waiting.
This is obviously a sonnet, a Petrarchan sonnet. It is “Petrachan” not only in
form (an octave plus a sestet) but also in content (dealing with the subject of love).
By choosing the time-honored form (sonnet) to treat the old-fashioned theme (love),
Ransom successfully brings us back to the ancient time when “courtly love” prevailed
as a literary convention in the West.
If the poem’s form suggests remoteness in time, its title suggests remoteness in
place. The word “piazza” denotes a porch or veranda in Southern U.S. where
Ransom was born. But it also denotes an open square or public place in a city or
town of Italy. From the poem’s text (esp. l. 5 & 1. 13), we may conclude that the
former meaning is more pertinent than the latter. Nevertheless, the Italian-sounding
word can never fail to strike into an English reader’s mind a Romantic aura of being
in (Medieval or Renaissance) Italy. Thus, the title as well as the form seems to
prepare the reader for experiencing something “Italian.”
This Italian something is of course not just a pizza, although like a pizza it does
have a “foreign” or “queer” flavor. Even a quick reading of the poem, I am sure,
will leave the reader this impression: This Italian sonnet is quite unusual. It seems to
be a little drama presenting vividly a scene in which a gentleman is courting a lady
complainingly and without success at the present stage. And what makes this drama
even stranger is: the two characters do not appear simply as two ordinary lovers; they
appear rather to have some symbolic force.
Indeed, if we make a closer study, we will find that the gentleman who speaks
the octave is emblematic of Death while the lady who speaks the sestet is emblematic
of Youthful Beauty. Thus, the wooing process is queer indeed, and the conventional
theme of courtly love has turned into another conventional theme--that of carpe
diem--since the young lady is being warned of death soon before she can fulfill her
love wishes.
But how does this double theme make itself felt? How can we associate the
complaining gentleman with Death and the jilting lady with Youthful Beauty? To
answer these questions, we need to go into details of the poem.
As the little drama opens its scenes, we first see a gentleman in a dustcoat.
What is a dustcoat? A dust-colored coat? Or a coat full of dust? It can be both.
In fact, it is the grave (a dust-colored and dusty thing) in which Death as a gentleman
will hold Youthful Beauty as a lady to his bosom and kiss her. So, by coining the
new word “dustcoat” Ransom has unmistakably connected Death to the “old man” or
“grey man” whose words are “dry and faint as in a dream” and who can hear “the
spectral singing of the moon.”
The lady, on the other hand, is a “lovely lady,” a lady “young in beauty” with
“soft and small” ears. She explicitly represents Youthful Beauty, in a word. But
she is implicitly compared in the meantime to roses dying on the trellis (1. 5)--a
conventional metaphor which suggests the fleeting nature of youth and beauty under
the sway of Old Time or Death.1
Thus, we see Death personified as a grey old gentleman meeting at the piazza
with Youthful Beauty personified as a lady. The former complains that the latter will
not listen to him and so he has to remind her of her transient life, boasting meanwhile
that he will have her soon.
But the young lady continues, of course, to refuse the old
gentleman (young ones simply cannot accept the idea of death). As the old man is
forever trying to make the young lady hear, so the lady is forever waiting for the
coming of her truelove. She has to reject her repulsive suitor by threatening to
scream upon the suitor’s further advance. But ironically, we know, the “coy
mistress” may really wait until she dies; her truelove may turn out to be her rejected
constant wooer: Death.
This irony contains a serious truth (the final succumbing of youth and beauty to
death). But on the stage of this little poetic drama we see only a comic (even farcical)
scene between a forward old Jack and backward young Jill. Accordingly, a
mock-serious tone is established in the poem.
The light tone is rendered with the aid of the sound effect in the poem.
Instead
of the usual rhyme scheme abba abba cde cde, we have here abba acca a’dd c’c’a’,
where “a’” shares with “a” the sound “-ing” and “c’” shares with “c” the sound “-m.”
This, together with other abundant sound repetitions in the lines, makes the poem
alive with jocular atmosphere.2
Besides helping to lighten the tone, the sound repetitions in the poem can also
echo its sense. In the octave, for instance, all the sibilant sounds uttered by the
gentleman--“dustcoat, ears, soft, small, listen, men’s, whispering, sighing, see, roses,
trellis, spectral, singing, must, soon”--seem to suggest the harsh ghostly whispers of
a senile suitor, while those in the sestet--“comes, kiss, vines, this, whose, words, as,
trellis, Sir, scream”--can also suggest the soft though sometimes shrill whispers of a
lady. Moreover, the poem is full of such nasal sounds as m, n and ng, which boom
or drone in the reader’s ears all the time, suggesting the persistent ringing of lovers’
words in each other’s ears.
The persistency of courtship is additionally made clear through the refrains in
the octave and the sestet. When we come to the eighth line (“I am a gentleman in a
dustcoat waiting”), we are automatically called back to the same sentence in the first
line. Likewise, the fourteenth line (“I am a lady young in beauty waiting”) is a
return to the ninth line. Hence, the refrains seem to suggest the repeated courting of
the gentleman and the repeated refusing of the lady. And how true this is, since
Death is indeed forever attempting to catch the forever death-rejecting Youthful
Beauty.
The two refrains involve a syntactic technique.
As we know, the words
“trying” and “waiting” are usually, as in the first and ninth lines, to be followed by
some adjuncts to make the sense complete. Now, as the eighth and fourteenth lines
end with these words, we cannot but feel something lacking and expect to link to them
more words such as those in line 2 and line 10. Consequently, this syntactic strategy
naturally leads us back to the second and tenth lines when we come to the end of the
octave and the sestet. And thus the gentleman and the lady’s dialogue will never
cease.
And this suggests the perpetual theme that Death is perpetually trying to
have Youthful Beauty while Youthful Beauty is perpetually waiting for her “truelove”
to come.
From the above analysis we can see that Ransom has made use of many means
(title, verse form, personification, verbal ambiguity, metaphor, irony, tone, sound
effect, syntax, etc.) to create an allegory with a double theme (courtly love and carpe
diem) or a little drama with two conventional allegorical figures: Tod und das
Mädchen, Death and Maiden. And all these in turn have created successfully a sort
of tension (to use a term of Ransom’s critical school3 ) in the work, with its familiar
form but peculiar content, its mocking tone but serious import, its spectral elderly
suitor but human young belle, its suggested remoteness but realized immediacy in
time and place, its simple language but complex ideas, etc., as two opposing forces or
“conflict structures” to constitute the poem’s totality of meaning.
Notes
1. Cf. Edmund Waller’s “Go, lovely rose,” in which a beautiful lady is also
compared to (or even identified with) a rose.
2. The use of thyme or sound repetition usually lightens the tone of speech.
That is why many English serious poems are written in blank verse, a form
avoiding the use of rhyme.
3. Tension is a term originally used in a particular sense by Allen Tate, who
together with Ransom and others are the advocates of the so-called New
Criticism . The term has now come to mean any “conflict structures”
which have helped to give shape and unity to a work.