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 and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a
hose.
5
1945
1. "A ball turret was a plexiglass
sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and inhabited by two .50
caliber machine-guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner
tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below,
he revolved with the turret; hunched up-side-down in his little sphere,
he looked like the fetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him
were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam
hose" (Jarrell's note).
__________
Eighth Air
Force2
If, in an odd angle of the hutment,
A puppy laps the water from a can
Of flowers, and the drunk sergeant shaving
Whistles O Paradio!3---Shall I Say that man
Is not as men have said: a wolf to man?4
5
The other murderers troop in yawming;
Three of them play Pitch,5 one sleeps, and one
Lies counting missions, lies there sweating
Till even his heart beats: One; One; One.
O murderers! . . . Still, this is how it's
done:
10
This is a war. . . . But since these play,
before they die,
Like puppies with their puppy; since, a man,
I did as these have done, but did not die---
I will content the people as I can
And give up these to them: Behold the man!6
15
I have suffered, in a dream, because of
him,
Many things;7 for this last saviour, man,
I have lied as I lie now. But what is lying?
Men wash their hands, in blood, as best they can:
I find no fault in this just
man.
20
1948
2. "
'Eighth Air Force' is a poem about the air force which bombed the
continent from England. The man who lies counting missions has one to go
before being sent home. The phrases from the Gospels compare such
criminals and scapegoats as these with that earlier criminal and
scapegoat about whom the Gospels were written" (Jarrell's note).
And, later, Jarrell remarked: " 'Eighth Air Force' expresses better
than any other of the poems I wrote about the war what I felt about the
war."
3. An operatic aria.
4. An often quoted
phrase from the Roman poet Plautus (ca. 254-184 B.C.), Asinaria,
II, iv, 88. In particular, Jarrell may be alluding to Bartolomeo
Vanzetti's (1888-1927) speech in the court where he and Nicola Sacco had
been convicted of murder and sentenced to death in what amounted to a
trial of their Anarchistic political beliefs.
5. A card game.
6. Pilate offered
the Jews their choice whether Jesus or Barabbas should be released, and
the people chose Barabbas. "Pilate therefore went forth again, and
said to them, Behold, I bring him forth to you, that you may know that I
find no fault in him. Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of
thorns, and the purple robe. And Pilate said unto them, Behold the
man!" (John 19:4-5.)
7. Just before
calling on the Jews to decide between Jesus and Barabbas, Pilate
received a message from his wife: "Have nothing to do with that
just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of
him." (Matthew 27:19.)
__________
A Girl in a
Library8
An object among dreams, you sit here with your shoes off
And curl you legs up under you; your eyes
Close for a moment, your face moves toward sleep . . .
You are very human.
But my mind, gone out in tenderness,
Shrinks from its object with a thoughtful
sigh.
5
This is a waist the spirit breaks its arm on.
The gods themselves, against you, struggle in vain.8a
This broad low strong-boned brow; these heavy eyes;
These calves, grown muscular with certainties;
This nose, three medium-sized pink
strawberries
10
---But I exaggerate. In a little you will leave:
I'll hear, half squeal, half shriek, your laugh of greeting---
Then, decrescendo,9 bars of that strange speech
In which each sound sets out to seek each other,
Murders its own father, marries its own
mother,
15
And ends as one grand transcendental vowel.
(Yet for all I know, the Egyptian Helen
spoke so.)
As I look, the world contracts around you:
I see Brünnhilde had brown braids and glasses
She used for studying; Salome straight brown
bangs,
20
A calf's brown eyes, and sturdy light-brown limbs
Dusted with cinnamon, an apple-dumpling's . . .
Many a beast has gnawn a leg off and got free,
Many a dolphin curved up from Necessity---
The trap has closed about you, and you
sleep.
25
If someone questioned you, What doest thou here?
You'd knit your brows like an orangoutang
(But not so sadly; not so thoughtfully)
And answer with a pure heart, guilelessly:
I'm studying. . . .
If only you were
not!
30
Assignments,
recipes,
the Official Rulebook
Of Basketball---ah, let them go; you needn't mind.
The soul has no assignments, neither cooks
Nor referees: it wastes its time.
It wastes its time.
Here in this enclave there are
centuries
35
For you to waste: the short and narrow stream
Of life meanders into a thousand valleys
Of all that was, or might have been, or is to be.
The books, just leafed through, whisper endlessly . . .
Yet it is hard. One sees in your blurred
eyes
40
The "uneasy half-soul" Kipling saw in dogs'.10
One sees it, in the glass, in one's own eyes.
In rooms alone, in galleries, in libraries,
In tears, in searchings of the heart, in staggering joys
We memorize once more our old
creation,
45
Humanity: with what yawns the unwilling
Flesh puts on its spirit, O my sister!
So many dreams! And not one troubles
Your sleep of life? no self stares shadowily
From these worn hexahedrons,
beckoning
50
With false smiles, tears? . . .
Meanwhile Tatyana
Larina11 (gray eyes nickel with the moonlight
That falls through the willows onto Lensky's tomb;
Now young and shy, now old and cold and sure)
Asks, smiling: "But what is she dreaming of, fat
thing?"
55
I answer: She's not fat. She isn't dreaming.
Believe, awake, that she is beautiful;
She never dreams.
Those sunrise-colored clouds
Around man's head12---that inconceivable
enchantment
60
From which, at sunset, we come back to life
To find our graves dug, families dead, selves dying:
Of all this, Tanya, she is innocent.
For nineteen years she's faced reality:
They look alike already.
They say, man wouldn't
be
65
The best thing in this world---and isn't he?---
If he were not too good for it.13 But she
---She's good enough for it.
And yet sometimes
Her sturdy form, in its pink strapless formal,
Is as if bathed in moonlight---modulated
70
Into a form of joy, a Lydian mode;14
This Wooden Mean's a kind, furred animal
That speaks, in the Wild of things, delighting riddles
To the soul that listens, trusting . . .
Poor senseless Life:
When, in the last light sleep of dawn, the
messenger
75
Comes with his message, you will not awake.
He'll give his feathery whistle, shake you hard,
You'll look with wide eyes at the dewy yard
And dream, with calm slow factuality:
"Today's Commencement. My bachelor's
degree
80
In Home Ec., my doctorate of philosophy
In Phys. Ed.
[Tanya, they won't even scan]
Are waiting for me. . . ."
Oh, Tatyana,
The Angel comes: better to squawk like a chicken
Than to say with truth, "But I'm a good
girl,"
85
And Meet his Challenge with a last firm strange
Uncomprehending smile; and---then, then!---see
The blind date that has stood you up: your life.
(For all this, if it isn't, perhaps, life,
Has yet, at least, a language of its
own
90
Different from the books'; worse than the books'.)
And yet, the ways we miss our lives are life.
Yet . . . yet . . .
to have one's life add up to yet!
You sigh a shuddering sigh. Tatyana
murmurs,
"Don't cry, little peasant"; leaves us with a
swift
95
"Good-bye, good-bye . . . Ah, don't think ill of me . . ."
Your eyes open: you sit here thoughtlessly.
I love you---and yet---and yet---I love
you.
Don't cry, little peasant. Sit and dream.
One comes, a finger's width beneath your
skin,
100
To the braided maidens singing as they spin;
There sound the shepherd's pipe, the watchman's rattle15
Across the short dark distance of the years.
I am a thought of yours: and yet, you do not think . . .
The firelight of a long, blind, dreaming
story
105
Lingers upon your lips; and I have seen
Firm, fixed forever in your closing eyes,
The Corn King beckoning to his Spring Queen.16
1951
8. "
'A Girl in a Library' is a poem about the New World and the Old: about a
girl, a student of Home Economics and Physical Education, who has fallen
asleep in the library of a Southern college; about a woman who looks out
of one book, Pushkin's Eugen Onegin, at this girl asleep among so
many; and about the I of the poem, a man somewhere between the
two" (Jarrell's note).
8a. From The Maid
of Orleans, a play by Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805): "With
stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain."
9. In music, growing
softer.
10. Alludes to
Rudyard Kipling's poem, "Supplication of the Black Aberdeen,"
in which the dog prays to his master not to leave him, and attributes to
him the god-like power of having made "This dim, distressed
half-soul that hurts me so."
11. The heroine of
Pushkin's Eugen Onegin, Tatyana (or Tanya) Larina is a naïve
country girl who is infatuated with the melancholy, cynical Onegin, but
is rejected by him. He provokes a duel with Lensky, her sister's lover
and his own best friend, in which Lensky is killed. Remorseful, Onegin
travels abroad. Several years later he returns to find that Tatyana, now
the wife of a prince, has become a sophisticated beauty, and falls in
love with her. Though she still loves Onegin, she refuses to betray her
husband.
12. From
Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality: "But trailing
clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home." He
believed that children are endowed with a special awareness of nature
that dims and dies after they are born and grow to adulthood.
13. Jarrell says in
his notes that this is a quotation but declines to identify it.
14. A variant of the
major scale in music, whose softer tone has been used by many composers
to express a subdued, religious joy.
15. The
"braided maidens," shepherd, and watchman are minor characters
in Richard Wagner's operas who have good tunes to sing but are utterly
unaware of the significance of the events which transpire around them.
16. "The Corn
King and the Spring Queen went by many names; in the beginning they were
the man and woman who, after ruling for a time, were torn to pieces and
scattered over the fields in order that the grain might grow"
(Jarrell's note).
__________
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
5
Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,
Is learning what to overlook.17
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,
10
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,
15
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
20
I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me
The eyes of stranger!
And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile
Imaginings within my
imagining,
25
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
30
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
35
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,
40
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,
45
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.
50
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 I hear her telling me
How young I seem; I am
exceptional;
55
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.
60
1965
17. William
James (1842-1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist; the
quotation, slightly paraphrased is from The Principles of Psychology
(1890).
__________
Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair. Modern Poems: An
Introduction to
Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973,
pp. 325-330.
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