Jarrell’s poetry is self-consciously modern, with all
the up-to-date objects of the contemporary war-
world—gun-turrets, flak, Jills, Stalags, radar, car-
riers, hutment, prisoners-of-war, etc.—seeking to
create a contemporary fiction, in reality the timbre
of the prosodic voice is old-fashioned and labori-
ously cliche ́d. Mr. Jarrell talks of ‘‘... the train’s
long mourning whistle. Wailed from the valley
below,’’ ‘‘the last cloud-girdled peak,’’ the ward is
‘‘barred’’ with moonlight, ‘‘the squirrel gnaws
mechanically.’’ Always the texture of the poem is
as loose and casual as possible, as though attempt-
ing to hide the fact that the words follow each other
in an order chosen for any conscious poetic end. So
we have a poem. ‘‘Money,’’ starting with (surely a
handicap) the extraordinary, certainly-not-nymph-
and-shepherd lines:
I sit here eating milk-toast in my lap-robe—
They’ve got my night-shirt starchier than I
told ’em...Huh!...
I’ll tell ’em...
The poem, a monologue in dialect which
does not succeed in creating its speaker, ends
with the banal confession (a banality which is
not relieved even if one is conscious of its con-
trivance for a dramatic purpose):
When my Ma died I boarded with a farmer
In the next county; I used to think of her,
And I looked round me, as I could,
And I saw what it added up to: money.
Now I’m dying—I can’t call this living—
I haven’t any cause to change my mind.
They say that money isn’t everything: it isn’t;
Money don’t help you none when you are
sighing
For something else in this wide world to
buy...
The first time I couldn’t think of anything
I didn’t have, it shook me.
But giving does
as well.
In descriptive passages, as for example in the
poem ‘‘A Country Life,’’ he piles up the adjec-
tives till the nouns are over-governed and the
picture no longer substantially visual:
Or why, for once, the lagging heron
Flaps from the little creak’s parched cresses
Across the harsh-grassed, gullied meadow
To the black, rowed evergreens below.
Because most of the poems inLossesdeal
with a war environment one expects them to
contain the antithesis of life and death (that is,
both as subjects objectified by the created poem,
as well as common subject, by implication, in all
poems), yet here they are embossed and studded
with capitalized Lifes and Deaths throughout.
The word ‘‘Life’’ and the word ‘‘Death’’ are no
more help in articulating some vision of life and
death than the word ‘‘orange.’’ In fact, they usu-
ally serve as an evasion of any valid comment. In
one poem, ‘‘Burning the Letters,’’ which other-
wise might have been successful, Mr. Jarrell hits
the jackpot and litters his pages with the big
verities. We have words and phrases like ‘‘his
Life wells up from death, the death of Man,’’
‘‘The dying God, the eaten Life,’’ ‘‘The Light
flames,’’ ‘‘the unsearchable / Death of the lives
lies dark upon the life,’’ ‘‘eternal life,’’ ‘‘O death
of all my life’’ (there are nine mentions of life
in the poem) and ‘‘O grave.’’ O what a defeaning
organ-peal of the pseudo-profound. The voice
which might have led us nearer the mysteries of
life and death is lost in the noise. I had supposed
the snare of the old abstract poetic gear would be
more cunningly handled by a poet of Mr. Jar-
rell’s training. Here he allows the poem to dis-
solve into ‘‘vague immensities.’’
Where Mr. Jarrell is influenced by Robert
Frost, a poet to whom he has paid critical trib-
ute, his work reveals a simple, old-fashioned
nostalgia and these poems work successfully at
a humble magnitude. ‘‘The Breath Of Night’’
falls into this category. It begins
The moon rises. The red cubs rolling
In the ferns by the rotten oak
Stare over a marsh and a meadow
To the farm’s white wisp of smoke.
But, it should be noticed, the final stanza
effects an overtly moral dimension similar to
that in Hardy’sSatires of Circumstances. For,
as a matter of fact, Mr. Jarrell is more obligated
to Hardy’s small dramatic framework of inci-
dent than he is to Browning’s interest in charac-
ter or Frost’s effectively restrained sermonizing.
Still, when he remembers the deceptively homely
but polished verse of Frost, he can achieve a
pleasant simplicity, as in ‘‘A Country Life’’:
A bird that I don’t know,
Hunched on his light-pole like a scarecrow,
Looks sideways out into the wheat
The wind waves under the waves of heat.
The field is yellow as egg-bread dough
Except where...Losses