As a boy, Randall Jarrell posed for the statue of Ganymede, loved by Zeus, adorning the replica of the Parthenon in Nashville's Centennial Park. Jarrell's adult friends were bemused by this anecdote, for it seemed almost too appropriate to their idea of Jarrell's sensibility: over and over again their memoirs return, more or less uncomfortably, to Jarrell's lack of manly virtues. Berryman remembered that Jarrell once had a hangover brought on by a poisoned canapé: “He's the only poet that I've ever known in the universe who simply did not drink.” Robert Watson (Jarrell's colleague at Greensboro) remembered that, in addition, Jarrell did not smoke, use profanity, or enjoy jokes about sex. To Robert Lowell, consequently, Jarrell never quite seemed one of the boys: “one felt, beside him, too corrupt and companionable.”

Jarrell himself would not have denied these characterizations; teaching at Princeton, he complained openly about the “improper subjects” that marred conversations with his male colleagues. But Jarrell wasn't simply a prude. He took considerable delight in his transgressions of typically masculine behavior. Robert Fitzgerald remembered him as “one of the few men I have known who chortled. He really did. ‘Baby doll!’ he would cry, and his voice simply rose and broke in joy.” These exclamations were spontaneous, but they weren't unselfconscious, at least after Jarrell had known Berryman, Lowell, and Fitzgerald for many years. A man who writes his publisher that he's coming into New York on the “choo-choo” is making practiced fun of professional solemnity. So is the newly bearded poet who says this to Robert Penn Warren, his old teacher: “When I look in the mirror it's just as if the fairies had stolen me away.” There's not only something appropriate but something lovely in the fact that Jarrell's first encounter with high art was his posing for Ganymede.

But if Jarrell's friends were sometimes uncomfortable with this sensibility, his detractors were unsympathetic. The New York Times reviewer of The Lost World was downright mean, calling Jarrell's poems—among other things—corny, cute, folksy, infantile, pathetic, self-indulgent, sentimental, and tear-jerking. Jarrell was understandably upset by this notice (friends speculated that it contributed to the depression preceding his death) but he couldn't have been surprised, since these adjectives had been used for years to describe his poems (only not so many at once). Part of what Jarrell's male readers were complaining about was his repeated use of female speakers. And his female readers weren't fully convinced by these voices either: Elizabeth Bishop complained about “his understanding and sort-of-over-sympathizing with the lot of women.” As a more recent critic of both Jarrell's and Berryman's representations of female consciousness has said, “it is finally a narrow view of the feminine that he gives voice to.”

Unlike Berryman, however, Jarrell was not so much interested in prescribing a voice for women as developing a socially respectable way of dramatizing his own divided sensibility. As a critic, Jarrell was certainly comfortable with the professional man's world of hard-nosed reviewing (this may account, at least in part, for the common opinion that Jarrell's criticism is superior to his poetry). But the aggressive stance of his essays often seems defensive—a strategy that bolsters his ostensibly masculine credentials while allowing him to occupy a more marginalized position in his poems. Bishop once remarked to Lowell that Jarrell's women “seem to be like none I—or you—know,” and she was right: the female speakers of Jarrell's poems are closer to a man who doesn't drink or participate in lockerroom banter but who likes to read fairy tales and shout “Baby doll!”

But even if a compelling explanation of Jarrell's female personae could be mounted, the question of Jarrell's style (which also seemed feminine to many readers) would still remain. Close friends found Jarrell's poems formally wayward or—Allen Tate's word—limp. But just as Jarrell knew what he was doing when he cried “Peachy!” in the Princeton faculty club, he understood the implications of avoiding certain modernist tenets of good writing. As Langdon Hammer has suggested in an important reevaluation of Jarrell, the “manifest excesses” of his poetry are “evidence of his dissatisfaction with the boundaries within which he was obliged to work.” Early in his career, Jarrell set out to write poems that would not always be well-read through the lens of Tate's version of modernism. The results were poems that to an eye trained to look for irony seemed sentimental—poems that to Allen Tate seemed feminine.

Jarrell was able to capitalize on this impression. “I like your poetry better than anybody's since the Frost-Stevens-Eliot-Moore generation,” he told Elizabeth Bishop, “so I looked with awed wonder at some phrases feeling to me a little like some of my phrases, in your poems; I felt as if, so to speak, some of my wash-cloths were part of a Modigliani collage, or as if my cat had got into a Vuillard.” Bishop was the contemporary poet to whom Jarrell felt closest. Despite her sense of the limitations of his female personae, Jarrell found not only his words but his life uncannily reflected her poems. And while Jarrell's own poems don't often resemble Bishop's, they do exemplify Bishop's stylistic ideal of “a mind thinking” rather than a finished thought. Jarrell associated that ideal, as Bishop did not, with certain notions of femininity. But unlike Bishop, whom Tate or Lowell never expected to write “like a man,” Jarrell had to defend his stylistic choices. Just as a woman's voice allowed him to dramatize himself more openly, it also allowed him to publish poems that rubbed against the kind of modernism he learned from Tate, Ransom, and Warren. For Jarrell, the dramatization of a feminine sensibility became inseparable from the exploration of what might be possible in American poetry at the end of the line.

During his freshman year at Vanderbilt (1932-33), Jarrell was assigned to classes with both Ransom and Warren. Four years later, he and the slightly younger Lowell migrated to Kenyon College, continuing their studies with Ransom and Tate. Before he completed his M.A., Jarrell's poems appeared in the American Review (edited by Tate), the Kenyon Review (edited by Ransom), and the Southern Review (edited by Warren). But almost from the start Jarrell's teachers recognized that they had an uneasy disciple on their hands. “I like to talk shop, and aesthetics more or less is,” said Jarrell of Ransom, “politics and freeing the slaves not much.” Jarrell's politics kept him distant from Agrarian aesthetics as well. His early Marxism, fueled by Auden, gave him a more supple sense of poetry's historicity (“A poem, today, is both an aesthetic object and a commodity”), and his keen sense of the complexity of Tate's classicism allowed him to learn openly from his Romantic and Victorian predecessors: “the best modern criticism of poetry is extremely anti-romantic, and the change in theory covers up the lack of any essential change in practice.”

While he questioned his teachers, Jarrell didn't want his opinions to eclipse theirs entirely. He never lost respect for the rigor of Tate's formalism. And he always insisted that Tate and Blackmur (as well as Kenneth Burke and Edmund Wilson) wrote the best criticism of his time. But Jarrell's loyalty was never confused with dogmatism. When Margaret Marshall asked him to take her place as literary editor of the Nation, Jarrell thought himself worthy of the job precisely because he wasn't associated with “any particular variety of literary opinion.” Thinking of the Kenyon and Southern reviews, he explained that several of his friends were editors: “their dogmatic convictions and idiosyncrasies and general sectarian leanings hurt their work a lot.”

Jarrell meant to criticize the editorial decisions of Ransom and Warren, but he might as well have been discussing Warren's poems—though not Ransom's, with which Jarrell did feel some affinity: “To expect Tate's and Warren's poems to be much influenced by Ransom's is like expecting two nightmares to be influenced by a daydream.” Two nightmares: what bothered Jarrell most about Warren and Tate was their delight in violence and evil—a sensibility that Jarrell knew was deeply romantic, despite any gestures toward anti-romantic classicism. Tate's poems about the Second World War especially troubled Jarrell: “violence is to him, perhaps unconsciously, an intrinsic good,” he told Lowell. His criticism of Warren's 1944 Selected Poems suggested the political dangers of this aesthetic position.

[T]he only excuse you can find for doing nothing is to say that the world is essentially evil and incurable, that anything you did would only be a silly palliation to hide from yourself the final evil of existence; and so you believe in Original Sin, and dislike progress, science, and humanitarianism, and go in for religion and the Middle Ages, and so-on.

Ultimately, for Jarrell, this fascination with evil allowed Warren to avoid responsibility for the world's condition, however engaged with the social problems of the American South Warren's poems may have been.

Jarrell would sometimes be accused of maintaining too rosy an outlook on the modern world; but it was the dominance of Warren's sense of modernity's essential horror (present, Jarrell said, in the work of “thousands of others”) that eventually made Jarrell's position seem sentimental. To save Jarrell from this fate, some of his admirers have tried to grant him the prestige sometimes associated with Lowell's or Berryman's public agonies, insisting that Jarrell's death was a suicide. Helen Vendler has more sensibly wondered if Jarrell became, after being separated from his beloved paternal grandparents, a chronically depressed child: “One could read the life … as a desperate one, heroic in its struggle against emptiness, as though a drowning man were to come up for air a hundred times rather than thrice.” Like most people, Jarrell was not unacquainted with suffering; but his life-long effort to portray “difficult ordinary happiness” (a phrase he admired in Adrienne Rich's poetry) was fueled by his sense of the danger, so carefully avoided by Bishop, of idealizing human suffering.

Even when Jarrell was a student, he developed remarkably prescient terms to describe his distance from Tate's sensibility. In a 1939 letter he explained why he didn't feel any “abyss” of modern uncertainty opening up beneath him: “I think all in all I've got a poetic and semifeminine mind, I don't put any real faith in abstractions or systems; I never had any certainties, religious or metaphysical, to lose, so I don't feel their lack.” Here Jarrell is relying, as Bishop would later point out, on a sexist idea of femininity (one that equates it with amorphous physicality and uncertainty), but he is freely offering to Tate the terms in which his own poems would be discussed for many years to come. The difference is that Tate would never use the word “feminine” in anything but a derogatory sense; Jarrell, in contrast, welcomes the appellation.

“The Rage for the Lost Penny,” Jarrell's first collection of poems, appeared in 1940 as part of a New Directions gathering of Five Young American Poets. When Tate offered the first of several uncomfortable criticisms of the “limpness” of the poems, Jarrell responded that the effect was intentional: “it's an occupational risk, a defect of quality. In other words, I'd rather seem limp and prosaic than false and rhetorical.” “A Story,” which opens with these lines, was probably the object of Tate's censure.

Even from the train the hill looked empty.
When I unpacked I heard my mother say:
“Remember to change your stockings every day—
Socks, I mean.” I went on walking past their
Buildings gloomy with no lights or boys
Into the country where the roads were lost.

This is the only poem from “The Rage for the Lost Penny” that Jarrell would include in his Selected Poems (half of “For an Emigrant” was also included, though heavily revised). And it is the only poem in which we can feel the presence of Jarrell's later fascination with the fragile state of childhood domesticity.

If “A Story” consequently seemed limp and prosaic, it was in contrast to far more rhetorical lines like these, from “The Machine Gun.”

Our times lie in the welded hands,
Our fortune in the rubber face—
On the gunner's tripod, black with oil,
Spits and gapes the pythoness.

Some of Jarrell's earliest poems do veer closely to his teachers' apocalyptic sensibility (associated here, not coincidentally, with a threatening vision of femininity—the gaping pythoness): it was this side of the early Jarrell of which Tate approved. Even as late as 1985 Warren would say that some of Jarrell's best poems were written while Jarrell was still a student. But the attitude of those poems was learned behavior for Jarrell (his contemporaneous letters don't show it at all), and as soon as Jarrell found a way to express his own sensibility, his teachers were immediately dismayed. Reading Tate's or Warren's recollections of Jarrell, one feels that they saw him as they saw Hart Crane: the prodigiously talented young poet who never equalled his earliest successes, in part because of his suspicious sexuality.

The year after “The Rage for the Lost Penny” appeared, Edmund Wilson accepted a half dozen of Jarrell's poems for the New Republic: once again Tate expressed discomfort with some of their lines. The subsequently well-known “90 North” compares a childhood fantasy of discovering the North Pole with the adult realization of the meaninglessness of discovery. For the adult, there is nowhere to go but backwards; all steps are to the south. For the child, every night offers a new discovery.

                                                                                          In the child's bed
After the night's voyage, in that warm world
Where people work and suffer for the end
That crowns the pain—in that Cloud-Cuckoo-Land
I reached my North and it had meaning.

Tate wanted Jarrell to cut the first four of these lines, presumably because he once again found them limp and sentimental in contrast to the adult's confrontation with meaninglessness. The poem ends with lines much closer to Tate's sensibility (“Pain comes from the darkness / And we call it wisdom. It is pain”), but as William Pritchard has pointed out, “90 North” differs from Jarrell's earlier apocalyptic poems in that it “enacts its discovery of the world as pain within the poem, instead of laying it on from outside.” Jarrell's childhood fantasy is essential to the process; he conceded to Tate that “the stanza may be bad” but assured him that “it's impossible just to remove it.”

I doubt that Jarrell thought the stanza was bad, however, since its idealization of childhood once again foreshadows the preoccupations of his fully mature poems. But I suspect that Tate's continuing criticism helped to persuade Jarrell to cast his dramatizations of the “semifeminine” mind in a different form: “The Christmas Roses,” published in the New Republic a few months after “90 North,” is the first poem Jarrell wrote in a woman's voice. Compared to other poems Jarrell wrote at the same time, there's nothing about the content of “The Christmas Roses” that particularly demands a female speaker; a dying woman speaks to her former lover from a hospital bed. But in “The Christmas Roses” Jarrell's idea of femininity is crucially different from his earlier vision of the gaping pythoness; it is much closer to his poems of childhood vulnerability. While Jarrell wrote poems about childhood from the very start of his career, his turn to female personae came somewhat later: it was a strategy that allowed Jarrell to present his own sensibility more fully. Mary Jarrell would call these poems “semi-self portraits.” And she would remember that on at least one other occasion Jarrell wrote a poem in his own voice before changing it to a woman's: in “The Face” he simply replaced the word “handsome” with “beautiful” and added an epigraph from Strauss's Rosenkavalier, associating the poem with the Marschallin's lament over her aging face.

Jarrell must have suspected that Tate (or almost anyone else) wouldn't know how to read the overwrought final lines of “The Christmas Roses.”

Come to me! Come to me! … How can I die without you?
Touch me and I won't die, I'll look at you
And I won't die, I'll look at you, I'll look at you.

These lines came to Jarrell naturally (like his cries of “Baby doll!”), but he was canny as well as sincere, aware that he “was writing in an age in which the most natural feeling of tenderness, happiness, or sorrow was likely to be called sentimental.” Jarrell made this comment apropos of Ransom, who, he went on to say, “needed a self-protective rhetoric as the most brutal or violent of poets did not.” Jarrell's “Christmas Roses” needed protection as well. He told the more violent Tate that the poem “is supposed to be said (like a speech from a play) with expression, emotion, and long pauses. It of course needs a girl to do it. I can do it pretty well for myself, to anybody else I get embarrassed.” This explanation of “The Christmas Roses” is especially revealing of Jarrell's general predicament: given that he found his own sensibility “semifeminine” in contrast to Tate's glorification of the abyss, all of Jarrell's poems needed, as it were, a girl to do them. And since Jarrell was embarrassed by the sound of his own girlish voice, he enlisted female personae to speak for him. It was around the time he wrote “The Christmas Roses” that Jarrell also wrote his own epitaph in “To Be Dead,” a poem that remained unpublished until after his death: “‘Woman,’ men say of him, and women, ‘Man.’”

It was also at this time that Jarrell was drafting “The End of the Line,” his declaration of independence from the antiromantic modernism he had absorbed at Vanderbilt and Kenyon. The contiguity of these efforts suggests that Jarrell was trying self-consciously to write poems that wouldn't reflect Agrarian values—poems that were at least in this limited sense “postmodern.” For a brief time Auden offered an important example to Jarrell, but by 1946 Lowell seemed to Jarrell the legitimately postmodern poet (he first used the word “postmodernist” to describe Lowell's early poetry). And while Jarrell did try to write like Auden, he was not influenced by Lord Weary's Castle, even as he helped to canonize it as the decade's most important book of poems. Much modern poetry seemed to Jarrell primarily negative in impulse: it “rejects a great deal, accepts a little, and is embarrassed by that little.” Writing poems like “The Christmas Roses,” Jarrell wanted to risk even more embarrassment by including a wider range of human emotion. Lowell wasn't embarrassed enough, and Jarrell helped to make his friend's poems more encompassing, more forgiving.

Corresponding about the manuscript of Lord Weary's Castle, the agnostic Jarrell found Lowell's explanations of Christianity “humane and sympathetic” but was dismayed that there was “almost no indication of this attractive Christian attitude” in the fire-breathing poems. Lowell's early poems too often seemed to Jarrell (to borrow the phrase he used to criticize his own work) “false and rhetorical” in their savoring of evil and damnation. Jarrell consequently helped Lowell to change the ending of “After the Surprising Conversions” from this—

The multitude, once unconcerned with doubt,
Once neither callous, curious, nor devout,
Starts at broad noon, as though some peddler whined
At it in its familiar twang: “My friend,
Come, come, my generous friend, cut your throat. Now;
'Tis a good opportunity. Now! Now!”

—to this, the version which Lowell would publish in Lord Weary's Castle:

The multitude, once unconcerned with doubt,
Once neither callous, curious nor devout,
Jumped at broad noon, as though some peddler groaned
At it in its familiar twang, “My friend,
Cut your own throat. Cut your own throat. Now! Now!”
September twenty-second, Sir, the bough
Cracks with the unpicked apples, and at dawn
The small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn.

As Bruce Michaelson has shown, all that Jarrell did to provoke this revision (much like Pound, editing The Waste Land) was to criticize the diction, rhythm, and metrics of the earlier version. But his motive was to soften Lowell's tendency to emulate his teachers' delight in violence; having altered the earlier lines, casting the speech in past tense, Lowell realized that the poem could end with an image of natural continuity rather than apocalyptic horror. Its last three lines comprise one of the earliest manifestations of what Seamus Heaney has called Lowell's “less assertive voice,” the voice that would distinguish many of the poems of For the Union Dead.

An even more revealing response to Lowell came in “The End of the Rainbow,” first published in 1954 and later included in The Woman at the Washington Zoo. Lord Weary's Castle ends with “Where the Rainbow Ends,” Lowell's apocalyptic vision of Puritan Boston: “I saw the sky descending, black and white, / Not blue, on Boston.” Jarrell's much longer poem traces the thoughts of a female painter (named “Content”) who has moved from Massachusetts to Southern California. She hasn't been able to abandon her heritage completely; among her possessions are pieces of Pilgrim Rock, a copy of Emerson's Compensation, and a miniature of her great-great-great-grandfather, “pressed to death in Salem / For a wizard.” Content is aging, lonely, and obsessed with the ghosts of her past. Like Lowell, she almost sees the sky descending, “black and white”:

She looks around her:
Many waves are breaking on many shores,
The wind turns over, absently,
The leaves of a hundred thousand trees.
How many colors, squeezed from how many tubes
In patient iteration, have made up the world
She draws closer, like a patchwork quilt,
To warm her, all the warm, long, summer day!
The local colors fade:
She hangs here on the verge of seeing
In black and white,
And turns with an accustomed gesture
To the easel, saying:
“Without my paintings I would be—
                                                                                                                        why, whatever would I be?”

This turn from potential nightmare to the saving processes of daily life is quintessential Jarrell: not paintings, not even the act of painting, but the act of turning to the easel saves her, and the gesture is so much a part of her daily life that she can't imagine her existence without it. Her realization is almost empty of meaning (“whatever would I be?”), but it is crucial to the continuity of her life.

The realization also underwrites the poem's structure. “The End of the Rainbow” is typical of Jarrell's mature work in that it follows the turns and digressions of meditation, avoiding a clear sense of an ending or even of accumulated significance. And though the meditation is a woman's, Jarrell invites us to see “The End of the Rainbow” as a record of his own thoughts.

If you look at a picture the wrong way
You see yourself instead.
                                                                                          —The wrong way?

Content looks at the glass covering her painting and sees herself in her own work. This is not the “wrong” way to view the painting or to read the poem: Jarrell suggests that he may similarly be found in what he has made. “The End of the Rainbow” focuses on a woman because Jarrell associated its healthy acquiescence with femininity, just as he associated Lowell's apocalypticism with masculinity. Explaining what troubled him about the heroine of “The Mills of the Kavanaughs,” Jarrell said, “You feel, ‘Yes, Robert Lowell would act like this if he were a girl’; but whoever saw a girl like Robert Lowell?”

At the same time that he was reading Lord Weary's Castle, Jarrell saw himself in the poems of a particular woman. In this passage from his review of Elizabeth Bishop's North & South (which appeared shortly before the review of Lord Weary's Castle), Jarrell seems to be describing the ideals of his own poems—as he does not even when writing admiringly of Lowell or Williams.

Instead of crying, with justice, “This is a world in which no one can get along,” Miss Bishop's poems show that it is barely but perfectly possible—has been, that is, for her. Her work is unusually personal and honest in its wit, perception, and sensitivity—and in its restrictions too; all her poems have written underneath, I have seen it. She is morally so attractive, in poems like “The Fish” or “Roosters,” because she understands so well that the wickedness and confusion of the age can explain and extenuate other people's wickedness and confusion, but not, for you, your own; that morality, for the individual, is usually a small, personal, statistical, but heartbreaking or heart-warming affair of omissions and commissions the greatest of which will seem infinitesimal, ludicrously beneath notice, to those who govern, rationalize, and deplore.

For Jarrell, Bishop's poems offered a powerful corrective to the idealization of violence he found in Warren, Tate, Lowell, and “thousands of others.” “It is odd how pleasant and sympathetic her poems are,” he continued, “in these days when many a poet had rather walk down children like Mr. Hyde than weep over them like Swinburne, and when many a poem is gruesome occupational therapy for a poet who stays legally innocuous by means of it.” In his own poems, Jarrell preferred to weep, even if he gave readers like Tate the chance of finding his poems sentimental. Bishop herself never weeps, but she never rails against the world's evil, exempting herself from responsibility to that world—keeping herself “legally innocuous.”

The other words Jarrell uses to praise Bishop's work (sympathetic, personal, honest, sensitive, moral, heartbreaking) describe qualities Jarrell courted in his own. “Your poems seem really about real life,” he told Bishop with calculated naïveté, “and to have as much of what's nice and beautiful and loving about the world as the world lets them have.” Jarrell used these grand terms (life, beautiful, loving) intentionally; they allowed him to describe the mysterious ways in which the formal qualities of Bishop's poems, in contrast to Moore's, made them seem like a part of human life, rather than an artistic record of it: “I've quite got to like your poems better than Marianne Moore's as much as I do like hers—but life beats art, so to speak, and sense beats eccentricity, and the way things really are beats the most beautiful unreal visions, half-truths, one can fix up by leaving out and indulging oneself.” Jarrell admired exactly what Bishop tried hardest to capture in her poems: the process of thinking, rather than the completed thought—a formal structure that eschewed the contours of the well-wrought urn for a more wayward and self-questioning kind of poetry. With poems like “The End of the Rainbow” Jarrell would capture this ideal himself.

It would not be exactly right to say that Bishop was a crucial influence on Jarrell's poems; by the late forties his sensibility was fully formed. But as his letters to Bishop suggest, Jarrell felt that his mind was uncannily similar to hers: “It's a feeling I never have with anybody else,” he told her, “… It's as if you were a color I see so easily I hardly have to look.” Bishop's work provided him with a compelling example of his own aesthetic goals (one that he could write about more gracefully than he could write about himself), and in his review of North & South Jarrell easily enlists Bishop in his effort to undermine his teachers' values. In this regard, Bishop was especially useful to Jarrell because her poems did not overthrow those values completely. During the 1940s and 50s Jarrell would write appreciations of poets (Williams and Whitman most prominently) whose sensibility was far more capacious than Bishop's. Just as he never tried to write like Lowell, however, he never tried to write like Williams either. Poems like “A Game at Salzburg,” “A Girl in the Library,” or “The Night Before the Night Before Christmas” are loosened up in the way that Bishop's “bramble bushes” are; they retain an amount of formal clarity even as they trace the wayward action of a mind thinking.

Like Bishop's career, consequently, Jarrell's reveals a gradual development rather than a “breakthrough” to unprecedented formal or autobiographical openness. The early books offer suggestions of Jarrell's mature sensibility, and in The Seven-League Crutches, published in 1951, Jarrell perfected the formal strategies that would sustain his work until the end of his life. Reviewing the volume, Lowell praised “A Game at Salzburg” in terms that recall Bishop's way of talking about her own poems: it “has the broken, chanced motion of someone thinking out loud.” Jarrell had taught in the Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization in the summer of 1948, and the poem is set in the Schloss Leopoldskron, where Jarrell lived. The setting provides the only link between the three “games” the poem describes. First, Jarrell plays a game of tennis with a German man. Next, he meets a three-year-old girl who initiates a game well known to German children: she says to Jarrell, “Hier bin i'” [Here I am], and Jarrell, aware of the rules, replies “Da bist du” [There you are]. Throughout these two games, arbitrary and pleasant in themselves, there are hints of some darker significance. The tennis partner had been a prisoner of war in Colorado; and while Jarrell sits on the veranda with the little girl, “a darkness falls, / Rain falls.” The poem's third game takes place when the storm has passed.

But the sun comes out, and the sky
Is for an instant the first rain-washed blue
Of becoming: and my look falls
Through falling leaves, through the statues'
Broken, encircling arms
To the lives of the withered grass,
To the drops the sun drinks up like dew.
In anguish, in expectant acceptance
The world whispers: Hier bin i'.

“A Game at Salzburg” is a definitively post-war poem: Jarrell remains conscious of the Second War World but explores the odd ways in which the world absorbs its own destructiveness, moving forward. Though he wants to accept the loveliness of the world, there can be no answer to the world's “Here I am”: his acceptance is fragile, hesitant, like the associative structure of the poem itself.

A month after he published The Seven-League Crutches, Jarrell wondered about the “monotonous violence and extremity” of “The Mills of the Kavanaughs,” likening it to “a piece of music that consisted of nothing but climaxes.” In contrast, Jarrell's “Night before the Night before Christmas,” the longest poem in The Seven-League Crutches, seems like a piece of music with no climaxes at all: it embodies a process of almost constant variation or metamorphosis. Like “A Game at Salzburg” though on a much larger scale, “The Night before the Night before Christmas” traces the thoughts of a “wandering mind.” But its prosody is looser. And the poem is even more characteristically Jarrell's in that its protagonist is a fourteen-year-old girl. She is (like Jarrell himself) a child of the thirties, and her mind is full of Marx and Engels, John Strachey's The Coming Struggle for Power, and Bertold Brecht's “In Praise of Learning.” Throughout the night, the girl's mind wanders between the “real” world these books describe and a dream world populated by her mother and pet squirrel, both of whom have recently died.

Even as she wraps Christmas presents, the girl cannot accept religious consolation (“how could this world be / If he's all-powerful, all-good?”), but she does believe that Marxist education might save her family. In her dreams, Engels becomes an angel; her squirrel might not have died, she muses, half asleep, “if he were educated.” Ultimately, however, her dreams won't protect her from her own life, from “the abyss that is her home.” In her final dream, she imagines that she and her brother (who is sick and may be dying as well) are Hansel and Gretel and then John and Wendy from Peter Pan.

                                                                                                    Staring, staring
At the gray squirrel dead in the snow,
She and her brother float up from the snow—
The last crumbs of their tears
Are caught by the birds that are falling
To strew their leaves on the snow
That is covering, that has covered
The play-mound under the snow. …
The leaves are the snow, the birds are the snow,
The boy and girl in the leaves of their grave
Are the wings of the bird of the snow.
But her wings are mixed in her head with the Way
That streams from their shoulders, stars like snow:
They spread, at last, their great starry wings
And her brother sings, “I am dying.”
“No: it's not so, not so—
Not really,”
She thinks; but she says, “You are dying.”
He says, “I didn't know.”
And she cries: “I don't know, I don't know, I don't know!”
They are flying.

These lines offer a condensed version of the poem's almost constant process of metamorphosis; their force is centripetal, pushing the poem in several disparate directions at once. Instead of saying “I am flying” as the children do in Peter Pan, the girl's brother says “I am dying.” Her dreams had been her only refuge from her mother's death, but death has intruded even there. She makes room for it, however, imagining death as one of childhood's delightful adventures: the word “flying” initially allowed the word “dying” into the dream, but now the acts of flying and dying merge in a fantasy of omnipotence. Yet the dream ends, as it must, and the poem itself ends with these lines.

She feels, in her hand, her brother's hand.
She is crying.

Given his friends' earlier responses to his poems, Jarrell must have known he was courting all the usual objections to his “semifeminine” sensibility. Bishop's example had helped him to write “The Night before the Night before Christmas,” but Bishop herself was uncomfortable with the poem. She told Jarrell that she liked it, but she also wondered if it were loose, overly long, and possibly self-indulgent. Jarrell replied cheerfully that “Rilke certainly is monstrously self-indulgent a lot of the time.” Years earlier, he had told Tate that limpness was an “occupational risk,” and Jarrell responded similarly to Bishop's charge of self-indulgence. “The Night before the Night before Christmas” represents his most ambitious effort to write against the grain of certain prejudices his teachers distilled from their strategically limited reading of modernism. And if the poem resists any effort to read it closely; if it violates Poundian strictures against Victorian sentiment; if it fits comfortably neither with the poems of Williams nor the poems of Tate; if it even seems mannered or self-indulgent in its preoccupation with children and fairy tales, then the poem has succeeded in the terms Jarrell valued most. Lowell seemed to recognize this when he wrote that “The Night before the Night before Christmas” was the “best, most mannered, the most unforgettable, and the most irritating poem” in The Seven-League Crutches.

Like Lowell, Bishop did admire Jarrell's poems, whatever her misgivings; she seemed genuinely dismayed when her second book won the Pulitzer instead of Jarrell's Selected Poems, and she praised Jarrell for avoiding (as she did herself) the “anguish-school that Cal [Lowell] seems innocently to have inspired.” But given Jarrell's consistent admiration for Bishop, it isn't simply ironic that Bishop was particularly troubled by The Seven-League Crutches. Writing about “A Girl in the Library,” another poem from this volume, Langdon Hammer wonders if Jarrell's decision to address the girl “begins to look like a way of preserving male authority by making it appear benevolent.” This charge might be brought against others of Jarrell's poems: their desire to speak to, for, and about women could be a way of appropriating (and thereby delimiting) the terms of femininity. After Jarrell's death, Mary Jarrell recalled that “The Lost Children” (spoken by a woman) grew from her account of one of her own dreams; the most famous lines in the poem (“I know those children. I know all about them. / Where are they?”) were actually written by Jarrell's wife. What may initially seem like an act of appropriation and mastery on Jarrell's part is something more complicated, however, since Mary Jarrell recognized that her words echo lines that Jarrell himself had already written in “Thinking of the Lost World.” To her, “The Lost Children” was as much about Jarrell's “happy-sad recollections of lost boyhood” as it was about “a woman's happy-sad remembrances of lost motherhood.” Similarly, she felt that “The Night before the Night before Christmas” was the first of Jarrell's “lengthy semiautobiographical poems that culminated in the three-part Lost World.” There are some poems (Hammer is right to single out “The Girl in the Library”) in which Jarrell asserts male authority in the guise of sympathy for women; but other poems (like “The Night before the Night”) suggest that Jarrell sometimes occupied within our culture a legitimately and productively feminized position.

The importance of granting this possibility is suggested by the New York Times review of The Lost World. Dismissing most of the volume, Joseph Bennett wrote that there were four successful poems. Two of them (“Woman” and “In Nature There Is Neither Right nor Left nor Wrong”) are unique in The Lost World for their sexism: “Men are what they do, women are what they are,” says the tough-talking female narrator of “In Nature.” In contrast to these poems, “The Lost World” and “Thinking of the Lost World” are not spoken by women; nor do they concern women's experience. Having spent many years impersonating a woman, Jarrell seems to drop the mask, speaking openly of his love of childhood, fairy tales, and pets. Tellingly, Bennett found these poems to be infected by “an indulgent and sentimental Mama-ism.” Jarrell had done something worse than pretend to be a woman: he had pretended to be himself.

Thematically, structurally, and prosodically, “The Lost World” and its pendant “Thinking of the Lost World” seem in retrospect to be the work Jarrell was always pushing toward. “Thinking of the Lost World” strikes a note that is not uncommon in Jarrell's poetry; in “The End of the Rainbow” or in “The Lost Children” there is a similar sense of emptiness transfigured into something palpable and dear. What is different about “Thinking of the Lost World” is that Jarrell openly associates these feelings not with women but with his own idiosyncratic sensibility. Judith Butler has argued that the act of female impersonation, even when it draws on unchallenging styles of femininity, “implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency.” “Thinking of the Lost World” may in this sense be the logical conclusion of Jarrell's life-long act of impersonation, since its effort of self-definition is no less dependent on masquerade—on the necessity of fabricating an identity, rather than taking it for granted.

At the end of “Thinking of the Lost World,” the bearded Jarrell drives past a boy who calls out “Hi, Santa Claus.” Jarrell waves, willing to play along, but newly aware that he's now as old as his grandparents once were. He looks at his hand on the steering wheel, and the hand becomes his grandmother's, brown and spotted: “Where's my own hand?” To answer this question, Jarrell confronts a vision of himself as a child. He knows that the child has nothing to give him. But as in Stevens (and looking back to King Lear), “nothing” becomes a powerful presence. As Jarrell drives inexorably forward, into the future, nostalgia is revealed as a fool's game—a game of pretense and disguise that Jarrell plays lovingly, over and over again.

                                                                                          I seem to see
A shape in tennis shoes and khaki riding-pants
Standing there empty-handed; I reach out to it
Empty-handed, my hand comes back empty,
And yet my emptiness is traded for its emptiness,
I have found that Lost World in the Lost and Found
Columns whose gray illegible advertisements
My soul has memorized world after world:
LOST—NOTHING. STRAYED FROM NOWHERE. NO REWARD.
I hold in my own hands, in happiness,
Nothing: the nothing for which there's no reward.