Randall Jarrell: A Man of War

Randall Jarrell expressed his deep passion for poetry and literature through harsh criticism. His style lent itself to another love of his, the battlefield. In 1942 He left the University of Texas at Austin for the United States Air Force. He found a common link between war and literature in "a job title he considered the most poetic in the Air Force," a celestial navigation tower operator. Jarrell romanticized the theater of war as so meny writers before him had. Suzanne Ferguson writes in Poetry of Randall Jarrell, about his use of theme as "relatively few and closely related as they evolve through his thirty-year writing career: in the poems of the thirties, the 'great Necessity' of the natural world and the evils of power politics; in the poems of the early forties, the dehumanizing forces of war and ways to escape or recover from these through dreams, mythologizing, or Christian faith; in the poems of the fifties, and continuing into the sixties, loneliness and fear of aging and death, again opposed by the imagination in dreams and works of art; and in some of the last poems, the defeat of Necessity and time through imaginative recovery of one's own past." As she observes Jarrell focuses upon war and the human reaction to war. In his poem The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, Jarrell parallels feelings of intimate human connection and complete detachment from human emotion. Key words like "froze" and "nightmare" signal the lack of communication, while on the other hand "mother's sleep" and "dream of life" encapsulate the desires of all peoples, to live comfortable and to continue living. 

The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner

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 flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Jarrell's great fixation in the forties was on death and dying, this work would rise to be celebrated as his truest and best remembered work. Hayden Carruth said "a considerable bulk of poetry ... the war poems make a distinct, superior unit." He wrote this in Nation to remember an author he cared about. He further believed that war had changed him even though he had only been a pilot instructor for Air Force in World War II. Jarrell's clean and well practiced poetry became more scattered and punctuated after the violent shock he encountered during the war; Carruth notes this same change "His early poems are sometimes mannered or imitative, and often artificially opaque; but from the first, he wrote with ease, and suffered none of the verbal embarrassment customary among young poets. When the war came he already possessed a developed poetic vocabulary and a mastery of forms. Under the shock of war his mannerisms fell away. He began to write with stark, compressed lucidity." These works would bring death to the forefront of his mind as his career continued, to consume him in the last years of his life. Still debated is the question of Jarrell's alleged suicide on U.S. 15-501. His close friend Robert Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop "There's a small chance [that Jarrell's death] was an accident. . . [but] I think it was suicide, and so does everyone else, who knew him well." With a somewhat tragic yet average end to his life, Jarrell is one to be remembered as a man of passion and conviction. In his constant search for knowledge, he found time to appreciate life as it is before death took him. In his poem Eighth Air Force is a warm remembrance of his compatriots from the war and also a fitting farewell of his own as "just a man".


Eighth Air Force


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 Paradiso!—shall I say that man
Is not as men have said: a wolf to man?
The other murderers troop in yawning;
Three of them play Pitch, 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:
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!
I have suffered, in a dream, because of him,
Many things; 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.


Sources:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5028212

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/randall-jarrell