SOURCE: Jones, Gloria G. “Ransom's ‘Good Ships.’” The Explicator 51, no. 1 (fall 1992): 39-41.

In the following essay, Jones provides an interpretation of a specific line of the poem “Good Ships.”

Taking the old cliché, “like two ships that pass in the night” Ransom constructs a powerful metaphor for two people unable to grasp the possibilities in a chance encounter in “Good Ships.” As Robert Buffington points out in The Equilibrist, “Except for one line, each detail is fitted to the one metaphor, and gracefully” (52). The implications of the poem are numerous. Not only does the couple fail to connect, they slip by one another by choice—“A macaroon absorbed all her emotion.” They are so preoccupied with the business of their lives, and perhaps their own commercial endeavors, that they cannot or will not risk a personal exchange. Described as “Fleet ships” in the first two words of the...