At first glance Randall Jarrell's “Seele im Raum,” while perplexing, seems not too difficult. It is obviously the monologue of a psychotic woman (cured or not cured) reminiscing on her malaise. She presents an almost clinical picture of psychosis—of delusions of grandeur in “My whole city sent me cards like lilac branches.”

Soul in space! But space can be isolation, and Seele means not only “soul” but also “mind.” The mind withdrawn, the retreat from reality: these are the marks, almost the definition of insanity. Insanity, however, is not confessed bluntly and outrightly. It is expressed through the metaphor of the eland. It is the eland, not her deranged mind, which interposes itself between her and her family, her friends, her whole world.

The death of the eland symbolizes not a cure but an arrestment. The pun on “eland” and “elend” reveals that nothing is changed. “Elend” means not only “wretched,” as she discovered from her German dictionary, but also “ill.” She lives among shadowy kaleidoscopic pictures from a floating world—the world of Ward Nine East.

When a moment comes when reality might solidify, when Seele—the mind—might assert itself in sanity, the remembrance crowds in that Seele—the soul—is dead. “And the eland comes and grazes on its grave.” (And the mockingbird is singing where she lies.)

The poem ends with a final, terrible renunciation of order, of sanity, of living: to own an eland, to reject all ties to humanity—this is being.

Well and good! And if this were all, then it would be well and good. But this is not all. The poem is the utterance of a demented woman, but it is also the utterance of a poet. What is he trying to say?

Soul in space, soul in isolation, soul in death. The metaphor changes and the eland becomes the animalistic nature of mankind. That the poet makes his statement through the mouth of a woman (the female is the weaker sex) only intensifies the alienation between Everyman and his spiritual being. The poet reveals his (or perhaps one) reaction to the crisis of belief.

If the soul is lost in space, if all its foundation for belief is emptiness, then faith is futile. But, conversely, when faith dies, the soul may not perish but must masquerade as mind. Which is reality—man merely a set of biological reactions or man a spiritual being?

Shall I make sense or shall I tell the truth?
Choose either—I cannot do both.

If only one could go back. If only one could exchange the too-pressing business of being human for “a pair of ragged claws / scuttling across the floors of silent seas,” one might escape the hopelessness and utter despair of life with the expectancy of nothing. But such an atavistic withdrawal is impossible. The primordial state can no more be regained than faith itself can be reborn.

If there is no meaning to existence, then existence itself is sinful—morally wrong. Woman and poet: each has arrived at the same conclusion, “To be at all is to be wrong.”