Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell

(1914-1965)

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Randall Jarrell was a World War II veteran, a private in the Army's air force. This experience was the subject of his early poems. Much of his life, however was spent in academe. He studied at Vanderbilt, as a psychology major, and did literature with John Crowe Ransom, a poet-critic, and changed the direction of Jarrell's career. Jarrell followed Ransom to Kenyon College as an English instructor. At Kenyon, he formed a lifelong friendship with Robert Lowell, another distinguished poet.

Later Jarrell also taught at the University of Texas, Sarah Lawrence, Princeton, Illinois, and for many years at the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina (now UNC Greensboro). His novel Pictures from an Institution used this this college as its setting.

Jarrell was poetry editor for the Nation in the mid-1940s and drew attention for his witty, astute, and outspoken reviews of poetry. Poetry and the Age (1953) includes especially brilliant essays on Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. Jarrell, who loved the German language, translated Goethe's Faust (Part I) and some of the Grimm fairy tales. In late years he wrote four books for children (with beautiful drawings by Maurice Sendak) including The Bat Poet (1964) and the posthumous Fly by Night (1976).

--from An Introduction to Poetry by X.J. Kennedy

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

* * * * *

Next Day

Moving from cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,

I take a box

And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.

The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical

Food-gathering flocks

Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,

Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise

If that is wisdom.

Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves

And the boy takes it to my station wagon,

What I've become

Troubles me even if I shut my eyes.

When I was young and miserable and pretty

And poor, I'd wish

What all girls wish: to have a husband,

A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wish

Is womanish:

That the boy putting groceries in my car

See me. It bewilders me he doesn't see me.

For so many years

I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me

And its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me,

The eyes of strangers!

And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile

Imaginings within my imagining,

I too have taken

The chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog

And we start home. Now I am good.

The last mistaken,

Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind

Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm

Some soap and water--

It was so long ago, back in some Gay

Twenties, nineties, i don't know . . . Today I miss

My lovely daughter

Away at school, my sons away at school,

My husband away at work--I wish for them.

The dog, the maid,

And I go through the sure unvarying days

At home in them. As I look at my life,

I am afraid

Only that it will change, as I am changing:

I am afraid, this morning, of my face.

It looks at me

From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate,

The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look

of gray discovery

Repeats to me: "You're old." That's all, I'm old.

And yet I'm afraid, as I was at the funeral

I went to yesterday.

My friend's cold made-up face, granite among its flowers,

Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body

Were my face and body.

As I think of her and I hear her telling me

How young I seem; I am exceptional;

I think of all I have.

But really no one is exceptional,

No one has anything, I'm anybody,

I stand beside my grave

Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.

* * * * *