the average serviceman he encountered, and he
was very conscious of this. He wrote to Margaret
Marshall, literary editor of theNation, that most
of those who died in combat were ‘‘kids just out
of high school—[I] believe that [the] majority of
such people that died were too young to vote.’’
Jarrell was certainly right about the youth of the
combatants. The United States began the war
requiring that recruits be at least twenty-one
years old, but this was dropped to eighteen, the
same age that the British eventually settled on.
Paul Fussell notes in his engaging book about
the psychological and cultural milieu that envel-
oped those who fought in the war: ‘‘A notable
feature of the World War II is the youth of most
who fought it. The soldiers played not just at
being killers but at being grown-ups.’’
Another of Jarrell’s letters to Lowell, writ-
ten just four months after the war ended, also
provides illuminating commentary on ‘‘Losses,’’
a strong feature of which is the passivity of the
fliers, their active wartime lives notwithstanding.
They are passive in the sense that they have no
control over their destiny, which is shaped by
something that is entirely out of their hands.
This lack of freedom of action may account for
the detached, unemotional tone of the poem.
The men seem to dissociate from the reality of
what is happening to them and to those who
become their victims. They are merely cogs in
the pitilessly turning wheel of war and have no
power to leave their appointed places, even if
they wish to. In his letter to Lowell, Jarrell
explores the philosophical issue of free will and
determinism. Although he does not believe in
determinism, neither does he believe in free will
in the sense that people always have the infor-
mation or knowledge to make a genuinely free
choice. More often, people are overshadowed by
experiences from the past that make them either
ignorant or only partially informed of their con-
dition, making the idea of a free choice impos-
sible. He then connects this reasoning to the war:
Most of the soldiers are, if not completely, at
least virtually, ignorant of the nature and con-
ditions of the choices they make; besides this,
they are pretty well determined in the passive
sense—even if they should choose not to do a
bad thing (and they usually do not have the
information and training to make it possible
for them to make a really reasonable decision
about it), they will be forced to do it by the state.
Jarrell also comments that the government was
responsible for giving out ‘‘misleading determining
information’’ to the soldiers, further reducing their
ability to make a free, informed choice. This pur-
veying of false information is hinted at twice in
‘‘Losses,’’ not only in the official declaration that
casualties were low (the last line of stanza 2) but also
in the statement that if the men were killed it
was due not to an accident but a mistake (stanza
2, lines 6–7), which suggests that planes were lost
and deaths occurred not because of any defects
or safety problems with the planes but because of
pilot error.
In the end, death is death and cannot be
denied. The speakers in ‘‘Losses’’ may claim that
it was not dying, but the wording of the poem itself
gives the cruel game away. In a poem of thirty-two
lines, the words dead,died,die,ordying occur
sixteen times. Indeed, thefour lines that constitute
stanza 3 all end with one of these words. The
language of the poem undermines the claims of
the speakers. The youthful airmen do die, at ran-
dom and without meaning, or at least without any
meaning they are able to determine. Such are the
individual tragedies of a war that comes upon its
boy-victims before they have had a chance to
become men.
Source:Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on ‘‘Losses,’’ in
Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.Matthew B. Hill
In the following excerpt, Hill suggests that the
dream in ‘‘Losses’’ presents a moment of epiphany
in which the speaker is forced to recognize the
reality of death and assume responsibility for his
actions.... Jarrell’s ‘‘Losses,’’ from his volume of the
same name, is perhaps his most forthright exami-
nation of the relationship between war, language,
and dreams. In this poem, we find Jarrell tracing
the military’s consistent deflection of ‘‘direct’’ lin-
guistic signification when dealing with the inevi-
tability of death in war. In Saussurian terms, the
poem interrogates the constant change in the
signifiers involved in the discourse of war, while
highlighting the fact that there is little or no
change in the actual, essential signifieds of that
discourse. The result of this sliding system of
signification is not only a deflection of meaning,
but one of responsibility for the extinguishing of
human life, both ‘‘friend’’ and ‘‘enemy.’’ In this
poem, the speaker, a member of a bomber crew,
seeks to understand his own actions, but is mired
in a language that actively resists a stable, rei-
fied labeling of events.Thisdeflectionisthe
Losses