Jarrell had to be brave to even attempt a poem so simple as this. There is no structured poetic theory like Stevens', between him and his subject, no fluffy metaphor to make the horror manageable, no "T. S. Eliotscotch-tape," as one of his memorialists says, to put the shattered lost world together again. And this is where Jarrell parts company with most of his contemporaries.
Jarrell's last poems go straight at contemporary situations. He is displaced and dispossessed by the whirl of American culture and finds himself in 'The X-Ray Waiting Room in the Hospital"...
I am dressed in my big shoes and wrinkly socks And one of the light blue, much-laundered smocks The men and women of this country wear All of us miss our own underwear And the old days.
His favorite writer was Proust and in his final book, The Lost World, he dipped back into his Hollywood childhood in two long poems. Though he tries to escape into the past, the book has residues of bitterness against the present from a collection of violent essays entitled A Sad Heart in the Supermarket he wrote in the early '60s. In The Lost World he writes a wonderfully weary poem of the suburban house that could have the same title as his earlier anthology:
Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All, I take a box And add to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens. The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical Food gathering flocks Are selves I overlook.
Twenty years ago, Jarrell had a reputation as America's great war poet, because he was writing about a different set of realities with the same kind of immediacy. He wrote then too on conventional themes, but extraordinarily well--the loneliness of the individual soldier, the bursts of sudden violence. His much anthologized "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," ends, "When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."
Jarrell's sudden death hasn't been as anonymous, and the Committee of memorialists has contrived to write something far more elaborate than the "anything will do" he asked for as an epitaph. Buried in this courteous and often adoring book are kernels of the familiar sad story of the American artist that poured out in Jarrell's poems. He was recovering or perhaps failing to recover from a nervous breakdown that October in North Carolina. "When I last saw him, not long before his death," Arendt writes, "the laughter was almost gone and he was ready to admit defeat."
The Tributes
This hint of nihilism in his death, helps explain the emotional flood it called forth from American poets. Some of the tributes are extravagant. "His poems give you a feel of a time, our time, as no other poetry of our century dies," James Dickey says. Even when Jarrell was in college, Ransom writes, "you knew that he had to become one of the important people in the literature of our time." Robert Watson is more to the point when he says, Randall Jarrell "looked open-eyed at the delights and horrors or our time."
In "A Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket" Lowell contemplates the brakish shoal, longing for the whalers who
....died
When time was open-eyed.
The memorialists may fear that in losing Jarrell, they have lost the last poet brave enough to look straight into America's face