BOO KS
545
"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 Educa–
tion, 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 some–
where between the two. A
blind date
is an unknown someone you ac–
company to something; if he promises to come for you and doesn't, he
has
stood you up.
The Corn King and the Spring Queen went by many
names; in the beginning they were the man and woman who, after rul–
ing for a time, were torn to pieces and scattered over the fields in order
that the grain might grow.
Some of my readers will say with a smile, "And now aren't you go–
ing to tell us who said, 'Against stupidity the gods themselves struggle
in vain'? who said, 'Man wouldn't be the best thing in this world
if
he
were not too good for it'? who had said to him, as a boy, 'Don't cry,
little peasant'?" No. This would take too much space, and would be a
sort of interference with the reader-and I don't want to do any more,
in this introduction, than put in an occasional piece of information that
may be useful to some readers.
This seems disingenuous, though it may be only unkind.
If
one really
wants to be useful to some readers, there are things in "A Girl in a
Library" that deserve more "explanation" than
blind date
does, arcane
locution though that be; and some readers need not have smiled through
so long a sentence if Mr. Jarrell had simply printed "Schiller," and so
on, instead of going coy. What we have here is actually a noteless Note.
The Com King and the Spring Queen and Tatyana Larina are iden–
tifiable fun-as is the ballad of
Samuel Hall,
which Mr. Jarrell mis–
quotes and bowdlerizes in another Note-, but they are not, like political
characters in Dante, solved by footnotes, and unless they are assimilated
into the poem they are obstructive at worst and decorative at best. A
serious problem: in his two excellent "Karamazov" poems in
Wilderness
Stair
Mr. Ben Belitt has shown how it may be worked out; but Mr.
Jarrell, in the present poem and in too many others, imposes allusion
without effecting any integration, and then teases or enrages his reader
with a propitiatory Note. For "A Girl" is a nice girl, in her sleepy way,
and she deserves something better than the allusive, donnish condescen–
sion that she gets:
One sees in your blurred eyes
The ((uneasy half-soul" Kipling saw in dogs'.
It may be so; but the verses should first have been read aloud, Kipling
or no Kipling.
Yet it is some comfort to reflect that only a good poet can disturb
us so by his lapses. Our Library Girl is in excellent company; indeed,
