Janet Waking Poem Analysis

Personal Response to Literature
“Janet Waking”, written by John Crowe Ransom, forms a double sonnet about an eight year old girl called Janet, who has recently received her pet chicken. In the morning of a peaceful day in the outskirts of town, a young girl faces the anticipation of a morning interaction with her new pet chicken. She wakes up from a dream to go into a nightmare after she finds out that her chicken had gone to an eternal sleep. Through the transitions, the visual imagery, the dark irony that forms this double sonnet, a reader can comprehend that death can be a harsh reality to a child that faces it for the first time.
In the beginning of the poem, the author chose to use symbolism in his title- “Janet Waking”- to add a touch of foreshadowing that reflects Janet waking up to reality. As the first stanza progresses, the light-hearted tone contemplates the innocence in the family’s home. The author brings in the way that “Janet slept [t]ill it was deeply morning” and contributes to the foreshadowing that includes mourning, the expression of sorrow that Janet will

experience later on in the poem. The anticipation that Janet felt early in the morning to go visit “her dainty-feathered hen” reinforces the delicacy and fragileness the addition to the family really has. The daily routine that Janet takes has changed since her pet chicken arrived and the reader can experience a bit of the affection that Janet has towards her new pet. The speaker during this poem, Janet’s dad, “who would have kissed each curl of his shinning baby”, perhaps introduces the way that her father would have moved mountains to keep his little girl from suffering the great feeling of sorrow.
In the middle of the poem, the author very bluntly contemplates a way to explain how Chucky has died. In a way “Old Chucky” did not have much time left alive but as Janet approached Chucky, “[r]unning across the world upon the grass” the author elaborates on the closeness that Janet and her pet chicken share. The words that the author chose compare the smallness of Janet and the huge yard that she has to go through to get to Chucky follows with a tone shift that explains the changes that will come in her innocence. The author uses onomatopoeia to reflect that “[i]t was a transmogrifying bee” that stung Chucky’s head, put the poison, and left the chicken until it “scarcely bled” into its death. The way that the author chose to shape the stanzas signifies the insignificance that the dead chicken had on those around it but another shift occurs adjusting the way that a cause and effect structure take shape.
Towards the end of the poem, the author continues to explain the effect of Chucky’s death with visual imagery.

The injectment causes Chucky to “[s]well with venom” and the author includes dark irony to present how Chucky’s “poor comb stood up straight [b]ut Chucky did not” expressing in detail the way that Janet found her pet chicken dead that morning. With no fair warning Old Chucky did not live to see another day which causes Janet to grow older and wiser with life’s experiences. With Janet not even knowing about death yet she goes into the yard and is “translated far beyond the daughters of men” establishing with those simple biblical words that Janet has moved from innocence to adulthood gaining knowledge and understanding of what happened to Chucky. Janet only being eight years old translated from a world of peacefulness and childhood to a world of painful and adulthood

knowledge.
Janet begged her parents to bring Chucky back to her and wake her from her eternal sleep but unfortunately Janet will never have Chucky back. Sometimes in life we expect death to happen but we do not always realize just like Janet did not realize just exactly “how deep [w]as the forgetful kingdom of death”.