had ‘‘a pretty good time when I was flying,’’ but,
since most of his fellow pilots were training for
combat, he had to conclude that being ‘‘washed
out’’ was ‘‘a very great piece of luck.’’ Had he
failed as pilot and then been assigned to Shep-
pard Field, he almost certainly would have been
made a gunner. Such are the sweet uses of per-
sonae: two of Jarrell’s best poems, ‘‘Gunner’’ and
‘‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,’’ resulted
from his relief at not occupying that most vul-
nerable position in a combat plane. The compo-
site voice in ‘‘Losses’’ intones, ‘‘In bombers
named for girls, we burned / The cities we had
learned about in school.’’ Jarrell writes in the
same letter that ‘‘your main feeling about the
army, at first, is just that you can’t believe it; it
couldn’t exist, and even if it could, you would
have learned what it was like from all the books,
and not a one gives you even an idea.’’ The
speaker of ‘‘Eighth Air Force,’’ who judges him-
self along with the other ‘‘murderers’’ who sit
around him playing pitch or trying to sleep, is
but one remove from the flight instructor who
describes to Tate how he would ‘‘sit up at night in
the day room... writing poems, surrounded
by people playing pool or writing home, or read-
ing comic-strip magazines.’’ Jarrell’s enthusiastic
description of the celestial navigation tower
where, ‘‘in a tower about forty feet high, a
fuselage like the front of a bomber—the nav-
igator... sits... and navigates by shooting with his
sextant the stars that are in a star dome above his
head’’ is answered, in ‘‘Losses,’’ by the complaints
of those who ‘‘died on the wrong page of the alma-
nac’’ because star data was misinterpreted. Neither
the confessional poems of a washed-out pilot nor
the objective observations of a non-combatant
could achieve the force of these dramatic poems
spoken by the victims. It is not surprising that these
two war volumes established for Jarrell a reputa-
tion for war poetry that he did not easily exchange
for a more timely label.
Jarrell’s child speakers have caused much
controversy among his readers. Robert Lowell
compared Jarrell with Wordsworth for making
of the child’s world a ‘‘governing and transcen-
dent vision’’ ([‘‘Randall Jarrell’’] 109). James
Dickey’s ‘‘B’’—half of his divided opinion on
Jarrell—accuses Jarrell of maudlin sentimental-
ity of a James Fieldian variety (45). Certainly,
Jarrell’s children constitute for him a less suc-
cessful distancing strategy than his soldiers or
women. One is conscious of the painful memo-
ries that created such poems as ‘‘A Story’’ and
‘‘The Truth,’’ although the situations in which
Jarrell places his child-speaker are fictional. The
most successful solution to this tonal problem is
to be observed in two poems, ‘‘90 North’’ and
‘‘The Lost World.’’ In these, Jarrell achieves dis-
tance through the use of a double persona, by
which the adult and child together recreate two
levels of consciousness: the powerless innocence
of the past and painful experience of the present.
Neither is superior to the other; both are simul-
taneously real. In a 1945 letter to Allen Tate,
Jarrell reacts to the marriage of Tate’s daughter
Nancy by saying that to him she will always be ‘‘a
fat little girl who surely can’t have ceased to exist,
but is waiting somewhere for you to discover that
the other is an impostor.’’ Thus did Jarrell’s chil-
dren exist on a causeway between past and
present, easily traversed when an impulse from
memory stimulated the mind to return.
Between ‘‘90 North’’ and ‘‘The Lost World’’
Jarrell wrote his more conventional dramatic
monologues wherein the child speakers are placed
in a fictional temporal and spatial setting. In
addition to ‘‘The State,’’‘‘A Story,’’‘‘The Truth,’’
and ‘‘Protocols,’’ grounded in the terrible realities
of the Second World War, there are the fantasy
settings of ‘‘The Prince’’ and ‘‘The Black Swan.’’
In the latter, as well as in the extended narrative
with dialogue, ‘‘The Night before the Night
before Christmas,’’ the speaker has the dramatic
advantage of being a girl rather than a thinly
concealed version of young Randall. Even the
most obviously biographical of these personae
are given the objective detachment of fictional
settings and time-frames necessary for the dra-
matic monologue. Among Jarrell’s uncollected
poems, until recently unpublished, is a case in
point. ‘‘The New Ghost’’ is the dramatic mono-
logue of a child newly separated by death from
parents who, he believes, have always considered
him an outsider. From his vantage point beyond
life, he looks in on the world of the living. His
‘‘scratchy wool gown and shoes that squeak’’ rep-
resent his new condition, while comfortable in the
lighted living room that has always excluded him,
the ghost’s parents appear happy to be rid of his
unwanted presence:
Father and mother are sitting there
To mean that I’m not really theirs
So that they don’t say a word to me
To pretend to me that I’m not there.
In a dream there’s no one there at all...
But—but there itisa dream.Losses