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

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