Poets Have Chanted Mortality

By John Crowe Ransom 1888–1974

It had better been hidden

But the Poets inform:

We are chattel and liege

Of an undying Worm.

Were you, Will, disheartened,

When all Stratford’s gentry

Left their Queen and took service

In his low-lying country?

How many white cities

And grey fleets on the storm

Have proud-builded, hard-battled,

For this undying Worm?

Was a sweet chaste lady

Would none of her lover.

Nay, here comes the Lewd One,

Creeps under her cover!

Have ye said there’s no deathless

Of face, fashion, form,

Forgetting to honor

The extent of the Worm?

O ye laughers and light-lipped,

Ye faithless, infirm,

I can tell you who’s constant,

’Tis the Eminent Worm.

Ye shall trip on no limits,

Neither time ye your term,

In the realms of His Absloute

Highness the Worm.

from The Fugitive, 1922

Biography

John Crowe Ransom was one of the leading poets of his generation. A highly respected teacher and critic, Ransom was intimately connected to the early twentieth-century literary movement known as the Fugitives, later the Southern Agrarians. Around the year 1915, a group of fifteen or so Vanderbilt University teachers and students began meeting informally to discuss trends in American life and literature. Led by John Crowe . . .

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