The child’s confused speech mirrors the pre-
dicament of one who, like Rilke’s dead children, is
a stranger in the world inhabited and controlled
by unfeeling adults. These children, crippled either
physically or emotionally,are obvious objectifica-
tions of the fears and hostilities that marred Jar-
rell’s childhood as well as our own. For several of
these children, the only comforter is a beloved pet,
the only escape the seven-league crutches of fan-
tasy, dreams or death. Such monologues make
Jarrell’s readers uncomfortable, because they strike
too close to aspects of reality we would like to
forget and because the tone in such poems cannot
be other than pathetic, even bathetic.
Jarrell’s feminine personae represent his
highest achievement in the dramatic monologue.
As versions of the Jarrelliananima, these speak-
ers are based on personal experience ironically
masked; as products of Jarrell’s reading of Rilke
and Frost, they achieve classical status. Jarrell
translated Rilke’s ‘‘Faded’’ and ‘‘The Widow’s
Song’’ at about the time he was writing ‘‘The
Woman at the Washington Zoo’’ and ‘‘The End
of the Rainbow.’’ Added to the Rilkean theme of
isolation and rejection is the Frostian character
of the mad or apparently mad speaker whom
Jarrell so much admired in ‘‘A Servant to Serv-
ants’’ and ‘‘The Witch of Coo ̈s.’’ Jarrell’s feeling
of ambiguity toward women, so brilliantly appa-
rent in the non-dramatic poem ‘‘Woman’’ and in
the essay ‘‘A Sad Heart at the Supermarket,’’
provides the ironic seasoning that such poems
as ‘‘Seele im Raum’’ and ‘‘Next Day’’ require.
The first of these personae must have been the
bereaved wife of ‘‘Burning the Letters,’’ but they
reach their height of dramatic realism in ‘‘Next
Day’’ and ‘‘The Lost Children,’’ which sit along-
side the supposedly confessional poems included
in and coming afterThe Lost World.
Perhaps none of Jarrell’s dramatic monologues
so successfully combines authenticity with self-dis-
placement as ‘‘Gleaning,’’ written in 1963 and one
of his last poems. The catalyst is a childhood mem-
ory, one contiguous with those that account for the
three semi-autobingraphical poems in ‘‘The Lost
World.’’ On the Sunday drives that the boy Randall
Jarrell took with his California grandparents, he
observed some aged persons patiently looking for
beans left by the pickers. Later, when the recollec-
tion merged with the Biblical story of Ruth and
Boaz, Jarrell was once again aware of the sweet
uses of personae. The speaker, sensing the allego-
rical implications of her gleaning, becomes, in a
compression of her entire existence, a ‘‘grown-up-
giggling, grey-haired girl’’ who has begun to ‘‘glean
seriously.’’ Like Ruth, she has ‘‘lain / At midnight
with the young men in the field’’; at the evening of
her life, she now awaits death, ‘‘A last man, black,
gleaming / To come to me.’’ Coming at the end of
Jarrell’s career, ‘‘Gleaning’’establishesbetterthan
any other poem how personal experience may be
universalized through the use of personae. The
modern gleaner could have been the subject of a
dramatic lyric poem with the observer as persona;
instead, Jarrell has given her particularly archetypal
significance. Jarrell had discussed with his publisher
a volume entitledWoman, which would have dis-
played his best speakers in a more advantageous
context than does their sporadic appearance in all
his earlier volumes (M. Jarrell, interview). Without
such an arrangement, Jarrell’s readers still have
evidence, both early and late, that the use of
women as personae was always for Randall Jarrell
a useful way to universalize his own experience.
Jarrell’s observer-personae demonstrate his
residual romanticism more than his modernism;
but if one can believe the Jarrell of ‘‘The End of
the Line,’’ there is no reason why a poet cannot
be both romantic and modern at the same time.
In poems like ‘‘The Sick Naught,’’ appearing with
the early war poems, and in much later ones, ‘‘The
Well-to-do Invalid’’ and ‘‘Three Bills,’’ Jarrell
becomes a dramatic lyricist—like Wordsworth,
Keats, or Arnold—who places himself, as surrogate
both for the reader and the poet, at the periphery of
a dramatic situation centered around someone who
has arrested his attention. The observer is a rather
transparent version of the poet, but the fact that the
action of the poem takes place in the present in
a fully realized spatial framework does, in fact,
make it a dramatic poem. A much-admired product
from the middle of Jarrell’s career, ‘‘A Girl in the
Library,’’ may serve as an illustration. Herein, the
speaker, almost surely a professor of literature, is
found at a safe distance leisurely observing ‘‘an
object among dreams’’ sitting ‘‘with [her] shoes
off’’ as her ‘‘face moves toward sleep.’’ Not content
with his status as an observer, the speaker conjures
up an image of Tatyana (fromEugen Onegin)to
serve as the girl’s antithesis in sophistication. He,
refusing to accept Tatyana’s arrogant dismissal of
the girl as a ‘‘poor fat thing’’ who is never to realize
her potential, mentally changes her to his ‘‘Spring
Queen,’’ symbolizing all feminine potentiality.
As her ‘‘Corn King,’’ theobserver successfully pen-
etrates the closed world of her psyche without even
disturbing her nap. A by-product of such poems is,Losses