Randall Jarrell Poetry: American Poets Analysis
Randall Jarrell’s poetry speaks with intelligence and humanity about the problem of change as it affects men and women in the twentieth century. Often using the motif of a dreamer awakening in an unfamiliar world, Jarrell probes the experience of each speaker to discover enduring truths, however bleak they may be. Although the speakers in his poems learn that the difference between innocence and experience is often bewilderment and pain, they also express a sense of dignity and affirmation. Whether the focus is on a soldier facing death, a mother relinquishing her son, or a lonely woman wandering in a zoo, Jarrell’s poems achieve a balance between the common experience of humanity and the suffering of the individual.
From the beginning of his career, Jarrell confronted the necessity that opposes human desires. In early works such as “For an Emigrant” and “The Refugees,” he acknowledges the enormous isolation that engulfs hopeful arrivals gaining their freedom only to endure without identity in their new homeland. On a larger scale, Jarrell also anticipates the self-destructive force of humankind in poems such as “The Automaton” and “The See-er of Cities,” in which archetypal death figures hover on the horizons of civilization. Jarrell’s lasting concern, however, is the individual’s search for meaning in a world of change and death. In “90 North,” a poem following the pattern of the dreamer awakening to the world of experience, a child secure in bed at night dreams of discovering the North Pole. Envisioning himself as an adult explorer, the lone survivor of his party, the child reaches his goal only to find darkness and cold. This experience of emptiness and death becomes for him the truth he sought: “Nothing comes from nothing . . ./ Pain comes from the darkness/ And we call it wisdom. It is pain.” Next, the child’s dream is juxtaposed with an adult’s dream in which North has no meaning, for the adult realizes that the dark world of dream is the final reality of humankind’s experience, the meaninglessness acceptable only to the unconscious and terrifying to the conscious explorer of existence. A deep-sea diver makes a similar journey in “The Iceberg,” finding ultimate annihilation in the “sick ambiguous wisdom of the sea” and surfacing to observe the many faces of the great berg melting as he loses consciousness.
Little Friend, Little Friend
In his second collection, Little Friend, Little Friend , Jarrell’s presentation of those affected by World War II reflects the same concern with the extremes of psychological experience, whether at first hand or vicariously. In the war poems, specific characters and settings provide a structural basis and blank verse provides the medium for the voices. In “2nd Air Force,” a mother visiting her son at an air base senses the necessary detachment of the young soldiers preparing their bombers, “hopeful cells/ heavy with someone else’s death.” She knows that her son, like the others, may as easily be a victim, and she ponders whether all her years of hope and care “meant this?” In the course of her meditation, she sees in her imagination the crash of her son in a burning plane; the distress call “little friend,” Jarrell’s title for the book, is repeated without hope of the young pilot’s survival. “Losses,” one of the most famous poems in the collection, voices the confusion of young soldiers for whom death has yet no personal meaning. They are amazed when members of their group disappear during training, since ordinary accidents lack the heroism expected in wartime. In their view, “it was not dying: everybody died,” and surely they expected more...
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of the experience than to die “like aunts or pets or foreigners.” Even in battle over the unfamiliar cities of the enemy, the youths still fail to comprehend the meaning of their end. The problem, as Jarrell’s simple, colloquial speaker addresses it, is that “When we left high school nothing else had died/ For us to figure we had died like.” Their dream of life failed to allow for personal experience of death; the cities they bomb are no more to them than names studied in geography class at school.
Jarrell’s awareness of the child within each fighting man appears also in “The State” and “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” often anthologized for their dramatic appeal. The speaker of the first understands the power of government through the loss of his family. He begins, “When they killed my mother it made me nervous,” continuing to lament the loss of his sister, and finally his cat; their disappearance causes the death of his consciousness, underscored by the simple frantic expression of a child. The speaker of “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” endures a cycle of birth to death in the course of his service to the “State.” Awakening to discover himself in the rotating turret of a fighting plane “six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,” his nightmare of reality ends as violently as it began, but his voice persists: “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” A poem recording a similar awakening with greater detail and tension, “A Pilot from the Carrier,” describes a flier’s escape from his burning plane and his lengthy parachute descent. Imagery of fire and ice effectively captures the intensity of his struggle to free himself from the “blazing wheel” of the cockpit. As the ball turret gunner falls into the belly of the State, so the pilot descends toward the warmth of the earth, its sunlight and stillness contrasting with his frenzied escape. As he hangs suspended over the sea, his new perceptions, “the great flowering of his life,” create a sense of detachment and calm. The brilliant gleam of his burning plane as it reaches the water reveals his location to an enemy plane so that he recognizes the approach of death as clearly as if he were “reading a child’s first scrawl.” In his last moments, he learns the lesson of his own vulnerability in the unreasoning natural world. As a bombardier realizes in “Siegfried,” death simply comes: “It happens as it does because it does.”
The difficulty of reconciling a moral perspective with the life of war is the subject of “Eighth Air Force,” one of Jarrell’s best-known poems. Civilian life and battle merge for the men of this force that bombed continental targets from bases in Britain. Having the opportunity for some domestic comforts, the men groom themselves, keep pets, and even cut flowers. As they lounge, playing cards and counting up their missions, are they murderers because they have fulfilled their duty the day before? The persona delivers no harsh judgment on these whom he observes, for he has been one of them and has survived. As Pilate offered Christ, so he offers these figures for whom he has suffered and lied in his dreams. As he sees it, the guilt must be widely shared: “Men wash their hands, in blood, as best they can.” Actor and victim become arbitrary designations once the process of war begins. In this view, to “behold the man” carries complex contradictory associations. The men are saviors of Europe, sinners against their own consciences, and scapegoats for others’ blame. As the speaker shares their role, the reader must evaluate the speaker’s final judgment that he “finds no fault in this just man,” a composite symbol for the Eighth Air Force and humanity itself.
Jarrell also deals with the problems of accepting violence and death as a part of life in “Burning the Letters,” portraying the wife of a pilot killed in the Pacific. Her husband died a fiery death, and now, several years later, she burns his letters as a sign of relinquishment. Jarrell notes that she was once a Christian, and in her meditation, imagery of her husband’s death mingles continually with imagery of Christ as she struggles to reconcile the paradox of life exchanged for death. In the context of her loss, Christ appears as a flame and a bird of prey seeking the hidden lives of those who dwell in darkness; then they turn on him, drawing from his life both bread and blood. Entering her dream, the woman sees herself as an aging child, clutching at the Christ figure who devours his own body before flickering away in the darkness. In addition to identifying the death of her husband with the death of Christ, she also recalls the sea burial of her husband in terms of the secretive burial of Christ’s body. Like those who buried Christ, and those who bury the dead at sea, she attempts to bury her dead in flames. Although she chooses life for herself, her final prayer is addressed to the grave. Her acceptance of the death of her husband points toward a final emptiness and negation; in this nightmare of experience, she acknowledges the same end discovered by the dreaming child in “90 North.”
If human experience converges ultimately in isolation, emptiness, and darkness, where is the life people expect to have lived? Dreams also carry out this function in Jarrell’s poems. “Absent with Official Leave” records the dream life of a soldier who finds his only protection from painful experience in sleep. There he achieves identity beyond his number and enjoys relationships not controlled by authority. After the lights dim, he enters the larger world “where civilians die/ Inefficiently, in their spare time, for nothing.” Curved roads, contrasting sharply with the grids of Army life, lead into a pastoral atmosphere where hunters seek birds in sporting fashion. In a cottage, the soldier visualizes the careful work of loving women “tending slow small fires.” Their presence signals a transition to the “charmed” world of a fairy tale, where the soldier becomes a bear sheltered by Snow White and Rose Red as snow falls in the form of gentle blossoms. Negative forces appear, also, in the shape of accusing eyes and “grave mysterious beings” from his past, who represent the causes that justify war. Although they mourn his fate hypocritically at best, in his dream they grant him justification, signifying the love that he longs to experience. The poem reflects Jarrell’s interest in the fairy tale and myth as a means of wish-fulfillment connected with the unconscious. The dreamer awakes, however, to the darkness of his fellow soldiers. A fuller development of the conflict between the fairy-tale world of dream and the painful nature of reality is “The Marchen,” dramatizing people’s desires to live and rule over an obstacle-filled environment.
The Seven-League Crutches
Although many critics believe that Jarrell found his most effective subject in the turmoil of war, his interest in the folktale stimulated a series of meditative poems in the collection The Seven-League Crutches. In the well-known poem “A Girl in a Library,” Jarrell considers the outlook of a modern young coed napping in the library. Although she is no intellectual (her subjects are home economics and physical education), she too is a dreamer, with the simplicity of a kitten. Unaware of the power that the library offers in terms of art or science, she rests secure in the method of her modern studies of function and technique. The speaker who observes her, however, recognizes her potential as a woman of virtue and intelligence such as Alexander Pushkin’s Tatyana Larina, if she should ever awake from her “sleep of life.” Her courses in food preparation and exercise will surely not arouse the soul within her, which “has no assignments/ neither cooks/ Nor referees.” The mythic self locked within her, however, balances the speaker’s judgment of her superficial dreams and pursuits. Two earlier poems that reflect similar needs among young students are “Children Selecting Books in a Library” and “The Carnegie Library, Juvenile Division.” In these poems, children seek intellectual transformation, unknowingly, in the imaginative world of myth and fairy tale, in contrast with the older girl, who will never be significantly changed by anything in the library. She will, however, carry out the rituals of love and suffering that the speaker anticipates in his allusions to the Corn King and Spring Queen of the ancient myths.
Jarrell’s interest in the psychology of the fairy tale also appears in several reworkings of well-known works. “A Quilt Pattern” incorporates the plot of “Hansel and Gretel” in a child’s dream that forms the narrative line of the poem, enriched with allusions to the Fall of Genesis. Hansel and Gretel are renamed “Good Me and Bad Me” to underscore the psychological aspects of the story. Similarly, Jarrell’s version of “Cinderella” portrays her as an ash girl rejecting the world in favor of an “imaginary playmate,” the godmother. This Cinderella indulges herself in fantasies that are destructive in the end. She moves from the fireside of her childhood to the furniture of marriage and family life, then finally into the fires of Hell, where she is again happy in isolation from reality. In like manner, Jarrell deals with the other side of fairy tales in “The Sleeping Beauty: Variation of the Prince” and “La Belle au Bois Dormant.” In the first reworking of the tale, Jarrell proposes a new ending in which the prince does not awaken the princess with his kiss, but determines to sleep on eternally with her, thus achieving a truly permanent union. The story also embodies a death wish—the desire for an unbroken peace—and a rejection of sexual fulfillment. In “La Belle au Bois Dormant,” Jarrell uses the sleeping beauty story in a perverse way to present a woman who has been murdered and dismembered by her lover. The poems are characteristic of Jarrell in the theme of a lonely death without transcendence or hope, but the characters lack the grounding in a human context that enhances Jarrell’s best work.
“The Woman at the Washington Zoo”
“The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” one of Jarrell’s most powerful treatments of human loneliness, reflects the intensity of experience typical of his poetry. An aging woman finds herself envying the caged specimens she observes for the attention they receive, while she remains invisible among the sightseers. Women pass her in brightly colored saris corresponding to the dramatic clothing of the leopard in his cage. The navy print she wears, however, receives no attention, no complaints, and entraps her as surely as iron bars imprison an animal body. The tall columns of Washington serve the same function, in fact, separating the lonely woman from the workers whom she passes. Her inner cries burst out in frustration at the world’s indifference to her suffering. In desperation, she covets the experience of violence she sees as the animals devour their meat. Identifying with the offal rejected by all but the vulture, the old woman imagines the hope of a magical transformation and release. Calling out to this ugliest of birds, she visualizes herself among the animal kingdom with humans as the ruler: “You know what I was,/ You see what I am: change me, change me!” In the impossibility of her outward renewal is the necessity that frustrates hope; in the expression of her need is release and affirmation of self. Jarrell’s poem gives utterance to the suffering of the woman as a type and as an individual, providing a wider recognition of her existence and of the human need for inner change and transformation through love.
The Lost World
Jarrell’s last volume of poetry, The Lost World, emphasizes the themes of his maturity: aging, loneliness, loss, and the dreamworld where every man is a child. “Next Day,” for example, is narrated by a lonely middle-class woman who has suddenly recognized her passage into old age. Her material and social success far surpass that of the woman at the zoo, but she is equally unhappy. The title of the poem refers to the woman’s vision of herself in the mirror the day after attending the funeral of a friend her age. In plain language and a contemporary American setting, Jarrell presents ordinary experience with great psychological intensity.
The poems of the final collection also treat the experiences of pain and loss with an affirmative note, for in these poems especially Jarrell develops the power of the dreamworld as real, if only in a metaphorical sense. In “The Lost Children,” “The Lost World,” and “Thinking of the Lost World,” the experience of reality attains for some a magical, mythical quality in its own right. “The Lost Children” originated as a dream recorded by Jarrell’s wife and develops a wish-fulfillment sequence found in “They” by Rudyard Kipling. Although Kipling’s story involves the recovery of a man’s beloved child among several who have returned to Earth after death, Jarrell’s poem uses this dream as a background for a mother’s contemplation of the possession and loss of a child as it matures. Each stanza then presents a stage in the process of separation and maturity. Eventually the parent exchanges the parental bond for friendship with the child as an adult, but the initial relationship lives on in the mother’s consciousness. The mother compares the persistence of memory to a hide-and-seek game that the little girls still require her to play. The thought of them brings sadness at their separation, but the richness of the association remains.
“The Lost World” recovers portions of Jarrell’s own past, using sensory impressions as French novelist Marcel Proust uses them in Le temps retrouvé (1927, Time Regained, 1931). The poem is Jarrell’s own, however, although it may have been stimulated by his interest in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931, 1981). Jarrell employs the effective strategies of his thirty years’ writing experience to create impressions of his life in Hollywood in the 1920’s, combining the world of his neighborhood with the world of art and filmmaking. Although the poem is narrated in the present tense, a sense of the struggle of re-creating time appears periodically as a conflict. Images of Hollywood, boyhood fantasies, and intense moments of pleasure or fear interweave in a journey undertaken to establish relationships between the past and the meaning of the present. “Thinking of the Lost World” considers the importance of the quest for the lost world of childhood. In keeping with the meditative intent of the poem, Jarrell returns from the formalistic use of terza rima that structures “The Lost World” to the conversational free verse characteristic of his later work. The flavor of chocolate tapioca evokes memories for the speaker of the poem as did the taste of the madeleine in Proust’s great work of memory, but Jarrell’s narrator finds the way into the past more difficult. “The sunshine of the Land/ Of Sunshine is a gray mist now,” he admits, and the atmosphere is as polluted as that of an area given up to industry. In the realm of memory, he constructs a compensating fantasy, an “undiscovered/ Country between California and Arizona,” where his past resides. He longs, too, for the objects of the past: his “Mama’s dark blue Buick” or “Lucky’s electric” surely could transport him back. His late aunt reappears to him often in the guise of other women, and in this regard, his past sustains itself in awakening memory.
The changes in his own body also testify to some remarkable ongoing process that persists despite the attempts of his memory to conserve the lost world of childhood and maturity. For the speaker as for the mother in “The Lost Children,” the paradox is that while nothing remains, all the past belongs to the rememberer. As he says, “My soul has memorized world after world,” and in this memory, he finds not merely an acceptable end, but also happiness. For him, an awareness of the loss is assurance of some existence in the past that transcends time and death. The awareness itself is a “reward,” a way of coming to terms with change in human experience, perhaps the central concern of Jarrell’s poetry.
Tremendous sensitivity, critical insight, and human concern characterized the work of Jarrell throughout his career. The vigor of his last poems suggests that his work had not reached its end, although much of his talent had fulfilled itself in his last books. Jarrell wrote poetry with a human focus, poetry that is lasting and influential in its attempt to communicate the nature of experience in the modern world.