A Blog A Week, Honoring Each Week One Chosen Famous Poet , First Week, Randall Jarrell
(1.)
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/01/specials/jarrell-crutches.html
October 7, 1951
With Wild Dogmatism
By ROBERT LOWELL
THE SEVEN-LEAGUE CRUTCHES
By Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell is our most talented poet under 40, and one whose wit, pathos and grace remind us more of Pope or Matthew Arnold than of any of his contemporaries. I don't know whether Jarrell is unappreciated or not -- it's hard to imagine anyone taking him lightly. He is almost brutally serious about literature and so bewilderingly gifted that it is impossible to comment on him without the humiliating thought that he himself could do it better.
He is a man of letters in the European sense, with real verve, imagination and uniqueness. Even his dogmatism is more wild and personal than we are accustomed to, completely unspoiled by the hedging "equanimity" that weakens the style and temperament of so many of our serious writers. His murderous intuitive phrases are famous; but at the same time his mind is essentially conservative and takes as much joy in rescuing the reputation of a sleeping good writer as in chloroforming a mediocre one.
Jarrell's prose intelligence -- he seems to know everything -- gives his poetry an extraordinary advantage over, for instance, a thunderbolt like Dylan Thomas, in dealing with the present. Jarrell is able to see our whole scientific, political and spiritual situation directly and on its own terms. He is a tireless discoverer of new themes and resources, and a master technician, who moves easily from the little to the grand. Monstrously knowing and monstrously innocent -- one does not know just where to find him ... a Wordsworth with the obsessions of Lewis Carroll.
"The Seven-League Crutches" should best be read with Jarrell's three earlier volumes. "Blood for a Stranger" (1942) is a Parnassian tour-de-force in the manner of Auden; nevertheless, it has several fine poems, the beginnings of better, and enough of the author's personality for John Crowe Ransom to write in ironic astonishment that Jarrell had "the velocity of an angel." "Little Friend, Little Friend" (1945), however, contains some of the best poems on modern war, better, I think, and far more professional than those of Wilfred Owen, which, though they seem pathetically eternal to us now, are sometimes amateurish and unfinished. The determined, passive, sacrificial lives of the pilots, inwardly so harmless and outwardly so destructive, are ideal subjects for Jarrell. In "Losses" (1948) and more rangingly in "Seven-League Crutches," new subjects appear. Using himself, children, characters from fairy stories, history and painting, he is still able to find beings that are determined, passive and sacrificial, but the experience is quiet, more complex and probably more universal. It's an odd universe, where a bruised joy or a bruised sorrow is forever commenting on itself with the gruff animal common sense and sophistication of Fontaine. Jarrell has gone far enough to be compared with his peers, the best lyric poets of the past: he has the same finesse and originality that they have, and his faults, a certain idiosyncratic willfulness and eclectic timidity, are only faults in this context.
Among the new poems, "Orient Express," a sequel, I think, to "Dover Beach," is a brilliantly expert combination of regular and irregular lines, buried rhymes, and sestina-like repeated rhymes, in which shifts in tone and rhythm are played off against the deadening roll of the train. "A Game at Salzburg" has the broken, charmed motion of someone thinking out loud. Both, in their different ways, are as skillful and lovely as any short poem I know of. "The Knight, Death, and the Devil" is a careful translation of Durer's engraving. The description is dense; the generalizations are profound. It is one of the most remarkable word-pictures in English verse or prose, and comparable to Auden's "Musee de Beaux Arts."
"The Contrary Poet" is an absolutely literal translation from Corbiere. The original is as clearly there as in the French, and it is also a great English poem. "The Night Before the Night Before Christmas" is long; it is also, perhaps, the best, most mannered, the most unforgettable and the most irritating poem in the book. Some of Jarrell's monologues are Robert Frost for "the man who reads Hamlet," or rather for a Hamlet who had been tutored by Jarrell. In "Seele in Raum," he masters Frost's methods and manages to make a simple half-mad woman speak in character, and yet with his own humor and terror.
My favorite is "A Girl in a Library," an apotheosis of the American girl, an immortal character piece, and the poem in which Jarrell perhaps best uses both his own qualities and his sense of popular culture. The girl is a college student, blonde and athletic.
But not so sadly; not so thoughtfully
And answers * * * guilelessly: I'm studying.
I quote the ending:
Sit and dream
One comes, a finger width beneath your skin,
To the braided maidens singing as they spin;
There sounds the shepherd's pipe, the watchman's rattle
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
Lingers upon your lips; and I have seen
Firm, fixed forever in your closing eyes,
The Corn King beckoning to his Spring Queen.
"Belinda" was once drawn with something of the same hesitating satire and sympathy.
Mr. Lowell, who received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1947, is author of "The Mills of the Kavanaughs."
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(2.) A video link- Jarrell speaking
Randall Jarrell Reads from His Work
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September 1948. The King's Hunt, BY RANDALL JARRELL
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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
Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,
Is learning what to overlook. 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,
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,
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
I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me
And its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me,
The eyes of strangers!
And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile
Imaginings within my imagining,
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
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
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,
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,
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.
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 and I hear her telling me
How young I seem; I am exceptional;
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.
Insert --Edited update,additional information
Writing[edit]
In terms of the subject matter of Jarrell's work, the scholar Stephanie Burt observed, "Randall Jarrell's best-known poems are poems about the Second World War, poems about bookish children and childhood, and poems, - ***such as 'Next Day,' in the voices of aging women."[1] *** Burt also succinctly summarizes the essence of Jarrell's poetic style as follows:
Jarrell's stylistic particularities have been hard for critics to hear and describe, both because the poems call readers' attention instead to their characters and because Jarrell's particular powers emerge so often from mimesis of speech. Jarrell's style responds to the alienations it delineates by incorporating or troping speech and conversation, linking emotional events within one person's psyche to speech acts that might take place between persons. . .Jarrell's style pivots on his sense of loneliness and on the intersubjectivity he sought as a response.[1]
From A Wikipedia link
https://www.modernamericanpoetry.org/creator/randall-jarrell
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My two tribute poems- composed to honor this truly gifted
and totally amazingly brilliant poet…
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(1.)
As I Sit Here Chilling On My Front Porch
As I sit here chilling on my front porch
Yet still wonderment in this aged soul
Tho' I feel far too fast fading life's torch
Seeking to find more than, world's heavy toll
Watching this world dancing through my front yard
Sipping hot coffee, daring to be free
Soaring fodder for a want to be bard
Or a brave captain sailing stormy seas.
Now I see trees swaying and waves crashing
Thunder blasting, arriving tempest roars
Fate cries, you chips you will soon be cashing
I say, go away now you simply bore
Sun and its golden rays beam as scene change
On my black mustang I am now riding
Across a desert prairie, open range
Searching through life while no longer hiding.
Ahead a glistening purple mountain
Destination for a sad broken heart
Treasure found as a renewal fountain
As dreaming depicted on my star chart
There awaits golden gems and lover's touch
An angel as promised ages ago
Nirvana, as true love delivers such
From there into Heaven away we go.
I sit here just chilling on my front porch
Yet still wonderment in this aged soul
Tho' I feel far too fast fading life's torch
Seeking to find more than, world's heavy toll.
Robert J. Lindley, JULY 11TH, 2021
Romanticism- Tribute poem for
Randall Jarrell
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(2.)
Wherein, Innocent Children Once Played.
Beyond the fall of that shimmering veil
With the folds of life's mysterious walls
Imprisoned in the dark pits of hell
Innocents that failed to heed this call
Soft beckoning into a warming light
Enticement to live in a sweeter state
Devoid of fear of life and evil night
As always forbidden there any hate.
For only joy and happiness resides
Among bright gardens and its golden walls
Left behind vanity and foolish prides
One only enters by Heaven's dear call
Time banished and true love reigns supreme
Peace there is the feast on which all may dine
Eradicated all the world's dark schemes
There is no greedy, this stuff is all mine.
Yes, truly such a treasure does exist
Wherein wicked world can never invade
Just beyond the purple veil's falling mist
Wherein, innocent children once played.
Robert J. Lindley, 9-17- 2021
Romanticism- Tribute poem for
Randall Jarrell
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Note-
This blog was started months ago- due to health issues then, was abandoned.
All that was needed was the second poem.
That was last night and finished this morn..
I leave it as it was first composed- unedited.