[In the following essay, Bottoms stresses the enduring appeal of Jarrell's poetry.]

I

I first encountered the poetry of Randall Jarrell in a freshman literature class at Mercer University. The text, I believe, was X. J. Kennedy's An Introduction to Poetry, and the poem was “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” The assignment our instructor gave us was to write an essay in which we compared Jarrell's poem to Wilfred Owen's “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” I was seventeen or eighteen years old, not much of a student, less of a writer, and for me that was a fairly demanding task. I don't remember what I wrote in that essay, something obvious about two different kinds of warfare and two different poetic approaches, but I do remember sitting up all night in my room in the freshman dorm, leaning over the Formica-topped desk, drinking Pepsi Cola, popping No-Doz, and pondering for hours in the faint light of my desk lamp the five little lines of Jarrell's poem—and gradually coming to appreciate the power of suggestion a poet can wrench from language, the weight of meaning a poet can make each word bear, and bear gracefully.

I'm not saying that “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” single-handedly brought me into the fold of Jarrell worshippers, but it was one of several poems we studied that quarter that shocked me with the power of words. It was for me nothing short of high voltage, and the nerve it touched is still tingling.

That was 1968 and the poetry of Randall Jarrell, who had been dead for three years, was still riding the crest of his influence. Had he lived, Jarrell would be seventy years of age, and he would no doubt be one of this country's most respected men of letters. But he did not live, and as we all know reputations fade quickly, even reputations as formidable as Jarrell's had already become. So what has time done to our opinion of Jarrell's poetry? “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is still in Kennedy's An Introduction to Poetry, now in its fifth edition, and no one doubts that Randall Jarrell wrote several poems that will last for as long as anthologies are being published. But what about the body of Jarrell's poetry? Has the criticism overshadowed it? Is anyone still reading Jarrell's poetry in depth? Has Jarrell's poetry influenced any of America's younger poets?

II

Dave Smith: If William Faulkner was for Southern writers, as Flannery O'Conner claimed, the ubiquitous Dixie Express, then what figure fits Randall Jarrell, who for the Southern poet is not a bit less present, alluring, and dangerous? Well, maybe, it's the brooding, slightly gothic, ever-forbidding, fan-whirring courthouse where everybody's life transpires and is stored—because in some senses Jarrell is not a human presence except as absence, a powerfully lurking absence like an old song, a strong scent, the feel of worn wood. Robert Penn Warren told me that he asked Jarrell to leave his freshman composition and literature class at Vanderbilt because the teenage Jarrell was demoralizing fellow students with acerbic and brilliant critiques of their class comment. Jarrell was that kind of literary critic, too, and that kind of critic of the South. He wanted things pure and wanted truth expressed. Yet he knew the meanness of the human soul and he was passionate. The contention of ruthless intelligence and the justice of aroused compassion mark his poems and keep them forever near me as the houses of place and character in the South. He is one of the great poets writing about children and is the greatest poet we had on World War II. Neither particularly links him with the South. He is Southern by birth, lodging, and mostly by the one quality in every poem: outrage. But outrage kept cool, functional, tempered by wisdom, mercy, irony, capacious knowledge, and unforgettable music. He is perhaps a little form-dominated, a little pretentious and officious, but if you have business to do with poetry and people you have to go to him, and you have to go through him—you cannot escape that. There are those who maintain he endures as a critic, less a poet. Bright, quick, and rapacious, his criticism remains right and readable—but he would be no more visible than Stanley Edgar Hyman or Yvor Winters if he were merely a critic. No, he was a poet, is a poet. Time has done its best, and will do more, to wash him from the lesser shades and the greater, but he remains with his songs, his tales, his obdurate and unswerving eye that identifies, as he says, “with something human.” Forever.

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Richard Tillinghast: Jarrell was absolutely the best practical critic of the late 40s and the 50s and in that role I admire and emulate him to an extremity. As a poet some fire, some juice was missing. He was always more of an intellectual, a theory man, than a born poet. He cared about poetry perhaps as much as a human being can. One key element of poetry that I never hear talked about until I bring the subject up is believability or convincingness, the sense that the poem matters. The Greek word apparently is deiktos: the sense of reality. When you read one of Robert Lowell's dramatic monologues in The Mills of the Kavanaughs like “Thanksgiving's Over,” where a mad girl who has died in a sanatorium speaks to her brother in a dream, you never doubt that this is real—with a higher degree of reality than the actual. It's the power of Lowell's own crazy vision that just burns it onto the page. In a poet of less natural power, such weird situations and characters would seem terribly arbitrary and uninteresting. That's what I get out of Jarrell's early dramatic monologues. He just did not have the fire to burn his own vision onto the reader's imagination. His war poems, however, are in a class by themselves. Perhaps because they are based on reality. … Then the plain-style poems that Jarrell did late in his career like the one about the middle-aged lady who moves from Joy to Cheer to All: they're touching, but there's something pathetic and cloying about them. Poets whom I admire immensely swear by these poems and might have things to say about them that would prove I had just missed the whole point. But Jarrell never taught me a thing as a poet. Pardon the seeming arrogance. I have learned many things from his criticism, such as his wonderful appreciations of Whitman and Frost.

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Diane Ackerman: Few poets have recorded death's “brute and geometrical necessity” as deftly as Jarrell does in his many poems about pilots dying during World War II, the first war fought mainly by machines. Jarrell himself enlisted in the Army Air Corps, washed out as a pilot, and went on to be a control tower operator who landed the B29's. Almost immediately he began his series of poetic outcries, in which the winged will is no match for the strafing mechanisms of death. It's the volleys of internal rhyme and repetition, the rhythmic, full-rhyming, end-stopped details of each death, personal and eccentric even, but part of a larger poetic structure, part of the machined inevitability of war, that sticks with me. For precisely-perceived hopelessness, Jarrell was tops.

To me, that was the only period in his career when his passion and his language consistently merged into poems both terrifying and captivating. His suffering was so acute, he required stricter and finer forms to contain it. The result was a long eulogy of defeat, expressed in phrases graceful and brutal all at once. The dead-pilot poems are almost always first-person present, from the point of view of the dying pilot, a last rush of detail, a sympathetic death frozen in the heart of the surviving reader.

The one that moves me most is “Losses,” because it captures the innocence of the young flyers with such discrete irony and pain. “We died on the wrong side of the almanac,” it says simply, “Scattered on mountains fifty miles away; / Diving on haystacks. … / We blazed up on the lines we never saw / … (When we left highschool nothing else had died). … In bombers named for girls, we burned / The cities we had learned about in school— / Till our lives wore out. …” It's a poem heart-breaking in its rage at a species that could enclose children in metal, give them maps, and send them out to burn cities. That poem really shook me when I first read it; and I still find Jarrell a master of poignancy and drama.

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Leon Stokesbury: Randall Jarrell is a master of the personal in poetry and of the paths of memory. At his best (for me: “90 North,” “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” “Nestus Gurley,” “The Player Piano”) he captures a way of seeing the human condition and the past that is completely his own and is enormously successful. Painfully so.

But if Jarrell's poetry has a flaw, it is perhaps that he is sometimes longwinded. If a Jarrell poem goes on for more than two pages, then, with a few important exceptions, a somewhat prosaic discursiveness sets in. His poetry has never been noted for its sensuality, and this lack of sensuality becomes more noticeable the longer he goes on. It might be relevant that his most famous and certainly his most powerful single image is found in his shortest poem. I think that just occasionally this brilliant poet had a tendency to talk too much.

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Edward Hirsch: It is a fairly common critical idea that Randall Jarrell put his “genius” into his criticism and his “talent” into his poetry. But this is a distinction which doesn't mean very much to me. I admire the brilliance of Jarrell's essays, but I also love the attractive human clarity and warmth of his poetry. There are a handful of his poems which I wouldn't want to live without: “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” “Next Day,” “Well Water,” “Thinking of the Lost World,” “A Man Meets a Woman in the Street.” At times he writes under the shadow of his models (as who does not)—Proust, Wordsworth, Rilke—but there is also a voice in Jarrell's poems that is all his own: emotionally daring and direct, prosy, oddly plaintive and intense, simultaneously sweet and sorrowful, inextricably American. Who else would say, imagining himself as a sick child, “If I can think of it, it isn't what I want”; or following his wife through the streets of Manhattan, “Our first bewildered, transcending recognition / Is pure acceptance. We can't tell our life / From our wish.” At times he gets an almost Chekhovian feeling into his poems, but a Chekhov who writes “in plain American that even cats and dogs can read.”

A profound and consistent human empathy is the quality that I treasure most in Jarrell's poems. He has an enormous and uncanny ability to feel his way into the skin of other people. His soldiers and ball turret gunners, secretaries and housewives belong to a common human lot which he deeply understood. In his finest and most luminous poems, he is able to recreate the burden of ordinary adults shouldering their memories, carrying around the secret of their childhoods, the weight of their losses, the ritual of their daily lives which are so utterly “commonplace and solitary.” He writes with a bleak unflinching honesty and truthfulness, and it is no wonder that Robert Lowell called him “the most heartbreaking poet of his generation.” I think that Randall Jarrell's best poems can help us to understand ourselves, illuminating what he called “the dailiness of life.”

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David St. John: I've always loved the way Randall Jarrell could employ the narrative strategies of prose in his poetry while at the same time sustaining the psychological density of a lyrical poem. The extreme craft of Jarrell's poetry seems often disguised in the messy humanity of his subjects and concerns, and this disguise makes many of the poems appear more ragged and shaggy than they really are. Yet it is Jarrell's fierce love of the spirit, of the other-worldly as it is apprehended in the quotidian elements of our lives, that makes his work extraordinary and lasting.

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Robert Hass:

“OLD DOMINION”

The shadows of late afternoon and the odors
of honeysuckle are a congruent sadness.
Everything is easy but wrong. I am walking
across thick lawns under maples in borrowed tennis whites.
It is like the photographs of Randall Jarrell
I stared at on the backs of books in college.
He looked so sad and relaxed in the pictures.
He was translating Chekhov and wore tennis whites.
It puzzled me that in his art, like Chekhov's,
everyone was lost, that the main chance was never seized
because it is only there as a thing to be dreamed of
or because someone somewhere had set the old words
to the old tune: we live by habit and it doesn't hurt.
Now the thwack … thwack of tennis balls being hit
reaches me and it is the first sound of an ax
in the cherry orchard or the sound of machine guns
where the young terrorists are exploding
among poor people on the streets of Los Angeles.
I begin making resolutions: to take risks, not to stay
in the south, to somehow do honor to Randall Jarrell,
never to kill myself. Through the oaks I see the courts,
the nets, the painted boundaries, and the people in tennis
whites who look so graceful from this distance.

III

A few years later when I began to take poetry more seriously and came again to the work of Randall Jarrell, I was first attracted to the war poetry. In The Complete Poems many of the earlier ones, such as “A Girl in a Library,” “The Knight, Death, and the Devil,” “Seele im Raum,” seemed to me either difficult to access or outright boring. With only a few exceptions, notably “The Lost World,” I was not much engaged by the later poems either. But the war poems were immediately accessible, interesting, and frequently, I thought, adventurous. “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” had lost none of its voltage, and poems such as “Eighth Air Force,” “Mail Call,” “A Front,” and “Transient Barracks” seemed almost as powerful.

I am still moved by those poems, but as I look back over the body of Jarrell's war poetry, I don't find it quite as impressive as I once thought. I am not surprised by what Dave Smith, Richard Tillinghast, and Diane Ackerman say about the war poems, and were Mr. Gallup to conduct a massive reader poll, I suspect they would reflect the majority opinion. But for me, too many of these poems seem the work of a correspondent rather than a poet. Too often they are only successful observations that somehow fall slightly short of what Jarrell can do with language when he is at his very best.

One long-standing criticism of the war poetry is that Jarrell fails to make the soldier human. In his poems we see pilots, gunners, prisoners, but seldom do we see individuals. Jarrell rarely achieves magic enough to breathe into his characters their own unique lives. Nothing in Jarrell's war poetry, for instance, seems so shockingly human and tragic as James Dickey's picture of Donald Armstrong in “The Performance,” where with one gesture, a handstand, Dickey makes Armstrong unique and believably human.

The argument for Jarrell, of course, is that he is essentially dealing with the impersonal aspects of war. He is writing about a war between machines, a war that reduces individuals to subhuman status. Dickey, himself, makes this argument in his essay “Randall Jarrell.” Even so, I don't find anything in the war poems of Jarrell as shockingly impersonal or dehumanizing as the picture Dickey gives of air warfare in “The Firebombing,” where the distancing of the pilot is so great he has to struggle to feel the guilt he believes he deserves. And I don't find anything in the war poems of Jarrell as dispassionately right as the phrase in “Reunioning Dialogue” where Dickey strikes the perfect metaphor for air warfare. If ground action, as Paul Fussell explains in The Great War and Modern Memory, has been frequently described in terms of a contact sport such as football, then Dickey suggests the terrifying contrast of air warfare by having his pilots fly their bombers over “God's small, brilliant chess-set / Of world war.”

Another problem I have with the war poems is the same problem I have with much of Jarrell's poetry. This is namely the talkiness that Leon Stokesbury points to, and it is often the talk of what Richard Tillinghast calls “an intellectual, a theory man.” A good example of this is “The Truth,” a poem in which an English child struggles to come to terms with the death of his soldier father. The poem is spoken by the boy:

When I was four my father went to Scotland.
They said he went to Scotland.
When I woke up I think I thought that I was dreaming—
I was so little then that I thought dreams
Are in the room with you, like the cinema.
That's why you don't dream when it's still light—
They pull the shades down when it is, so you can sleep.
I thought that then, but that's not right.
Really it's in your head.

“The Truth” is a good poem, I think. But when we hold it up to Elizabeth Bishop's “First Death in Nova Scotia,” a poem of similar circumstance, Jarrell's language pales. Bishop's poem is spoken by a little girl who is viewing the body of her dead cousin. The story created by her mother is that “little Arthur” has been invited to be “the smallest page at court.” As these two poems develop, the difference in the two approaches becomes apparent. Bishop tends to show, creating through the child's eyes a wonderful series of revealing images: the stuffed loon, the frozen lake of the marble table, the coffin like a frosted cake, the body of the child like “a doll / that hasn't been painted yet,” images that build, layer upon layer, to one effect: the inability of the child to grasp the myth:

But how could Arthur go,
clutching his tiny lily,
with his eyes shut up so tight
and the roads so deep in snow?

Jarrell, on the other hand, tends to tell his poem. The child in “The Truth” is thinking and explaining, while the child in “First Death in Nova Scotia” is seeing and describing. Because of his tendency to say rather than show, Jarrell achieves little of the immediacy that Bishop achieves, an immediacy that can only be accomplished through the sensual. And when the Jarrell poem ends, it ends flat, without the element of surprise and wonder that Elizabeth Bishop is able to express, and also without the sense of authenticity. Which of these two poems is really more childlike?

Poetry is for me very much a thing of the senses, and this tendency to tell or explain is, perhaps, the weakest aspect of Jarrell's poetry. The most striking example of this is a poem called “The Face,” a poem which John Crowe Ransom, Jarrell's mentor at Vanderbilt and Kenyon, points to as one of his favorites. In his essay “The Rugged Way of Genius,” Ransom quotes the poem in its entirety and makes this comment:

The monotone of these flat repetitive phrases makes for a powerful eloquence. The moment is so actual and prolonged, the theme so absolute and simple; it is the tragedy of Everywoman as she stares and speaks into her mirror. Who will cast the first stone upon this ruined face?

That these lines are flat and repetitive is beyond doubt; that they are eloquent seems to me questionable. In an essay called “What is Not Poetry,” Karl Shapiro says, “If poetry has an opposite, it is philosophy. Poetry is a materialization of experience; philosophy the abstraction of it.” Taking this as my gospel, I expect a little more than Jarrell gives us here. When he says “It's so: I have pictures,” I expect to see one, if only a brief one. Yet here are twenty-seven lines of poetry and not one image. But this is Jarrell's worst fault carried to its extreme. In most of the poems, and certainly the war poems, the tendency to explain or tell, the “tendency to talk too much,” is held in tighter rein.

Curiously enough, when his imagery isn't so barren the conversational idiom works very often to Jarrell's advantage by creating a sense of intimacy and humanity. “A Girl in a Library,” Jarrell's reproof of a somewhat typical nonacademic college student, a goof-off as we were called at Mercer, has become over the years one of my favorites. Few poems in the body of his work illustrate such a wide range of emotion, for if this poem is a reproof, it is an extremely affectionate one. The poet begins by addressing the girl, who is about to fall asleep at her table in the college library:

An object among dreams, you sit here with your shoes off
And curl your legs up under you; your eyes
Close for a moment, your face moves toward sleep …
You are very human.
                                                                                          But my mind, gone out in tenderness,
Shrinks from its object with a thoughtful sigh.
This is a waist the spirit breaks its arm on.
The gods themselves, against you, struggle in vain.

This is vintage Randall Jarrell, the pun in line six, the witty indictment in line seven of a girl who is the very embodiment of stupidity, a girl who is only half-awake (literally and metaphorically) to the world around her. Here is a character Jarrell develops in extreme detail, and she is always for him a tragic figure, a girl who is incapable of reflection, who “purrs or laps or runs, all in her sleep,” and yet she is at the same time “very human.” In spite of her shallowness, her ignorance, her complacency, Jarrell is able to write “I love you—and yet—and yet—I love you,” a terribly dangerous line that works in the context of this poem like the right key in a lock.

It is entirely appropriate that “A Girl in a Library” appears as the first poem in The Complete Poems because it defines in several ways the characteristic quality of Jarrell's poetry. Here we see his capacity for love and forgiveness, what Edward Hirsch calls his “profound and consistent human empathy.” In this poem Jarrell himself is “very human,” and this is the quality in his work that I find most appealing.

Shortly following “A Girl in a Library” comes “Lady Bates,” an interesting if less successful poem. Here is a poem, a eulogy for a young black girl, that almost cries out for the charge of sentimentality. But it is exactly the sort of poem Jarrell could not avoid writing. “Lady Bates” doesn't approach Jarrell's best work, and it is riddled with irritating passages. At one point for instance, the poet fails to count very carefully and has the Holy Trinity singing “like a quartet.” But if “Lady Bates” does not illustrate Jarrell's full capability as a poet (even though there are a few winks of brilliance), it does illustrate his capacity to feel genuinely and deeply for another human being. And the sheer force of emotion in this poem, a dangerous poem to write, makes this one of my favorites. It is an extremely daring poem, and every line shakes with a fierce humanity.

Actually, one might easily pick up a copy of The Complete Poems, open it at random to any page, and point to a poem that embodies this quality. Still, whenever I think of the man Lowell called “the most heart-breaking poet of his generation,” two famous poems come immediately to mind, “Next Day” and “The Woman at the Washington Zoo.” The middle-aged woman at the supermarket, who suddenly comes to understand that her possibilities are dwindling, that her life is not moving “from Joy to All,” and the woman at the Washington Zoo, who comes to see that she is caged in her own aging body, who cries out in desperation “change me, change me,” illustrate as well as any of Jarrell's poems his ability to identify with other people, to share their desires and their disappointments, in short, their disillusionments. And this concern, this ability, this “profound and consistent human empathy,” gives rise to what remains for me Jarrell's most interesting theme—metamorphosis.

Jarrell's need to change, to evolve, which has been explored most usefully by Sister Bernetta Quinn, is exhibited in a great number of his poems and in a variety of ways. For me, though, the most fascinating treatment of this theme occurs in Jarrell's poems about children. When Dave Smith says that Jarrell is one of the “great poets writing about children,” he is very close to the mark. I can think of no modern poet who has examined so obsessively and successfully the terrifying interiors of childhood. Here Jarrell's most common vehicles for change are the alternative realities of dreams and fairy tales, quick magical transportation out of the present and into timelessness, out of the body and into new forms. It seems only natural to me that a post-Freudian poet such as Randall Jarrell would be drawn to these two vehicles, for in the various motifs of dreams and fairly tales, as in myth, we encounter our most basic desires and fears, and the psyche generally provides us with ways to deal with those. Only in the work of dreams, for instance, can the dead come back to us. And rarely in fairy tales do characters die. They are simply transformed, the good into the “pretty bird” of Grimm's “The Juniper Tree” or perhaps the swan of Jarrell's own “The Black Swan,” the wicked into something less appealing, a toadstool, a stone, a worm.

At their best these poems have the strange power to hypnotize the reader, but occasionally they have only enough power to put him to sleep. The danger that Jarrell falls into here is repetition. Sometimes I think that nearly everyone in Jarrell's poems is dreaming, and the dream becomes too easy a method of attempting to work magic in the poem. But repetition is the danger of the obsessed, and the intensity that Jarrell achieves in his successes makes the failures easy enough to forgive.

One of these successes is a poem Leon Stokesbury mentions as a favorite. In “90 North” a small boy climbs up to bed and falls into a dream of Admiral Byrd, a genuine American hero about whom he has, no doubt, studied in school:

At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its floe,
I clambered to bed; up the globe's impossible sides
I sailed all night—till at last, with my black beard,
My furs and my dogs, I stood at the northern pole.

What develops from here is, perhaps, Jarrell's bleakest vision. The child/explorer, among the frozen bodies of his companions, reaches the North Pole, the “final point” of his life, and discovers that once the goal is accomplished it becomes meaningless. From here, every direction south, there is no place to go but back:

Here at the actual pole of my existence,
Where all that I have done is meaningless,
Where I die or live by accident alone—
Where, living or dying, I am still alone;
Here where North, the night, the beg of death
Crowd me out of the ignorant darkness,
I see at last that all the knowledge
I wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me—
Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,
The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

Here Jarrell's barren lines, his talkiness, seem to be justified. The poem begins vividly enough with a description of the child clambering up to bed, the explorer trudging toward the North Pole; then as the landscape begins to grow barren, so does the language, until it finally becomes as empty and bleak as Jarrell's vision.

In several treatments of the metamorphosis theme, Jarrell weaves together the elements of dreamwork and fairy tales. This combination, which can be truly stunning, accounts for the success of at least three excellent poems: “The Black Swan,” “A Hunt in the Black Forest,” and “Hohensalzburg: Variations on a Theme of Romantic Character.”

“The Black Swan” starts from the same problem as “The Truth,” a child trying to come to terms with death, but it seems to me an infinitely richer poem. The situation is this. A little girl's sister has died, and unable to face the reality of this death, the child creates in her dream a fairy tale. Her sister has not really died; the swans on the lake have turned her into a swan.

Our most basic reason for denying anyone's death, of course, is to deny the inevitability of our own. And when the little girl goes down to the lake to search for her sister, she makes a frightening discovery. She is also being turned into a swan:

Out on the lake a girl would laugh.
          “Sister, here is your porridge, sister,”
I would call; and the reeds would whisper,
          “Go to sleep, go to sleep, little swan.”

Then she notices that her “legs were hard and webbed, and the silky / Hairs of my wings sank away like stars.” But she says to herself, “This is all a dream.” And as though to reassure herself, she reaches down from her pallet and touches the floor. Nevertheless, it is a powerful and persistent dream, a dream that embodies in its mystery a truth only a little less horrifying than the vision in “90 North,” for the poem ends:

          And “Sleep, little sister,” the swans all sang
From the moon and stars and frogs of the floor.
          But the swan my sister called, “Sleep at last, little sister.”
And stroked all night, with a black wing, my wings.

Jarrell almost always uses the dream as a means for the powerless to deal with some overwhelming reality. In “A Hunt in the Black Forest,” a wonderful poem by any standard; a child falls asleep one night and his desire to rid himself of some oppressive authority, real or imagined, manifests itself in his dream. He creates in his sleep a full-fledged fairy tale: an enchanted forest, a cruel king, a dwarf, a mute whose tongue has been cut out by order of the king. All of this combines for a tale of gruesome murder. The intrigue begins when the king, hunting in the Black Forest, is lured by the dwarf to a cottage:

He opens the door. A man looks up
And then slowly, with a kind of smile,
Acts out his own astonishment.
He points to his open mouth: the tongue
Is cut out. Bares his shoulder, points
To the crown branded there, and smiles. The hunter frowns.
The pot bubbles from the embers in the laugh
The mute laughs. With harsh habitual
Impatience, the hunter questions him.

The scene for revenge is set. Jarrell twice uses sound, bubbling and gobbling, to associate the mute with the boiling pot, so when the king “ladles from the pot / Into a wooden bowl, the shining stew,” we suspect something wicked unfolding.

A good narrative poem has what I like to call an edge. That narrative edge is the finely honed line between holding too much of the action back for too long and giving too much of the action away too soon. Either will kill a reader's interest long before the stew kills the king. When the narrative edge is sharp the poem is equally revealed to and discovered by the reader—there are connections to be made—and the poem has a sort of “on-the-edge-of-your-seat” effect. “A Hunt in the Black Forest” seems to me a nearly perfect unfolding of a richly textured tale, creating nothing short of genuine intrigue.

The poem ends by coming around full circle to the sleeping child, thereby emphasizing the frightening capability of the imagination, even a child's imagination. Here the dwarf and the mute, conspirators in murder, are watching through the window of the cottage. The mute is holding the dwarf up to the pane:

The pane is clouded with their soft slow breaths,
The mute's arms tire; but they gaze on and on,
Like children watching something wrong.
Their blurred faces, caught up in one wish,
Are blurred into one face: a child's set face.

Though “Hohensalzburg: Variations on a Theme of Romantic Character” is not about children, it does combine various elements of dream, fairy tale, and folklore. I am tempted to call this poem Jarrell's own variation of Robert Graves' White Goddess, the “Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust … whose embrace is death.” But the treatment here is solely Jarrell's, and the poem, clearly his most complex treatment of metamorphosis, illustrates forcefully the power of his imagination.

“Hohensalzburg …” is essentially a ghost story. A man is awakened one night by a brush against his hand, something like “the wing of a swallow,” and when he looks around, he is surprised to find that he is alone. There is only the moonlight. But something says to him, “I am here behind the moonlight.” The poem develops then as a dialogue between the persona and this something, this sort of spirit-lover who lives in “a castle that is asleep”; and this swallow-moonlight-spirit moves through a startling series of transformations: fairy tale princess to vampire-lover to little girl to starlight. The final transformation is accomplished when the two lovers finally achieve the union they desire and become “forever one / A dweller of the Earth, invisible.”

This poem is richly textured and beautifully developed. Jarrell's use of dialogue is itself magical, for the dialogue becomes the agent of metamorphosis. The effect of this is a real tension. Haunting, we might say. Here is how he manages one of the transformations:

                                                            You are asleep.
The leaves breathe with your breath. The last, least stir
Of the air that stumbles through a fur of leaves
Says the sound of your name, over and over, over and over
But someday—
Years off, many and many years—
I shall come to you there asleep,
I shall take you and …
                                                                      Tell me.
No, no, I shall never.
                                                                      Tell me.
You must not know.
                                                                      Tell me.
I—I shall kiss your throat.

I mention these few poems only as some of my favorites. They don't really scratch the surface of Jarrell's interest in metamorphosis, but they do suggest Jarrell's diverse development of the metamorphosis theme and stand as evidence that the dream/fairy tale motif does not become for him a formula simply to be applied to different situations. Certainly there are a few poems in the group that bear some resemblance, but most of the metamorphosis poems are individual and show the mark of an original imagination. And as a group the poems stand as firm evidence of Jarrell's fierce human compassion, his tragic and courageous vision, a vision that sees deeply into the human condition, the hopelessness of it, and still maintains hope for the possibility of change.

So what about the body of Jarrell's poetry? Is there enough originality, enough substance, to predict a degree of permanence? My answer is simply this. For me Randall Jarrell's poems have already lasted. And the reasons seem obvious. First there is Jarrell's great range of interest, and David St. John's phrase “messy humanity” seems to me a nearly perfect description of this. From a World War II bomber crashing in thick fog to a woman shopping for groceries to an engraving by Albrecht Dürer, if the subject is something human, Jarrell is involved, and he is usually involved fiercely, without hesitation to explore even the darkest, the most complex, the messiest aspects of his subjects. Then there are the qualities that characterize his poetry: wit, intelligence, imagination, compassion, and what I can only call a genuine talent for the word. And all of these qualities are unbridled in the real world, the world we share in our daily lives, so that when we read a poem by Randall Jarrell we feel that he is not simply talking about some disturbed child falling into a nightmare, or a few far-away, desperate people residing in some “fashionable suburb of Santa Barbara,” he is talking about us. He is putting us in touch with our common desires and fears, the things that link us in the most vital way, the things by which we define our humanity. For me this enrichment is one of the great virtues of poetry. And my life, certainly, would be poorer without the poems of Randall Jarrell.