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By DIANA BIRD
Rappahannock News Contributing Writer
Among the wild life that populates Horseshoe Hollow, our farm, are two Blue Jays whose territory is just outside the sunroom where we’ breakfast. Their size, sky-blue and white feathers make them conspicuous. Their industry, on the grass, darting from perch to perch among tree and shrub, suggests to me that they are nesting nearby.
Listening to them and watching them, I recall John Crowe Ransom’s Blue Girls, a poem about high school pupils he sees on the lawn in front of their boarding school. He likens them to blue birds and thinks of the brevity of their fresh, irrepressible years.
The girls remind him of his own youth when he was apparently enamored of a beauty like themselves. Now, he says, the person he knew then is a shrew and far from attractive. His telling lines about her hint at tragedy and aching regret.
Reading the poem, I am mindful of the not-so-old South that Tennessee Williams evokes in A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, when women seem sometimes to have destroyed themselves playing roles society urged upon them.
Blue Girls
Twirling your blue skirts, traveling 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 about your lustrous hair
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