BOOKS
139
For poets in this tradition, the 1950's presented special difficul–
ties. The lease might reasonably
be
supposed to have terminated,
the mortgage to have been foreclosed. Mr. Randall Jarrell as a poet
is
not narrowly in the tradition we have been discussing here, but
his new volume,
The Woman at the Washington Zoo,
does suggest
a farther stage; and at least one poem, "The End of the Rainbow,"
indicates with what complexity time is now treated.
In an early poem, "For My Daughter," Kees ends with the
line, "I have no daughter. I desire none." The first three poems in
Mr. Jarrell's volume are concerned with the emotional and spiritual
nullity in the lives of three women. I suppose, in a general way,
they represent the dangers Kees felt threatened any and all daugh–
ters today: "Parched years that I have seen/ That may be hers
appear." Of the three poems, "The End of the Rainbow" is by far
the most distinguished. Its attitude to time is its most interesting as–
pect. Time's erosive quality, once celebrated in the
carpe diem
poems, no longer has meaning, for the world of the senses is no
longer convincing to us as it was to Marvell. Similarly, the historic
and processional quality has led to nothing at all. In this situation,
time is a churn in which experience, now hopelessly watered down,
is whirled about in pointless agitation. But all the churning pro–
duces no golden solid, and perhaps the only reality we are left with
is a sense of the flux of time itself. In a curious way this poem re–
minds one of Ingmar Bergman's
Wild Strawberries,
in which time
is liberated from the processional sequence. The images in both
poem and film, whether verbal or visual, possess a fluidity that
tel~
scopes time. For the audience of both works, time
is
the experience,
and the images and actions are little more than an offered mode of
apprehending it. The following long passage from near the end of
the poem should help to make this clear:
She wakes, sometimes, when she has met a friend
In the water; he is just standing in the water, bathing.
He has shaved now, and smells of peppermint.
He holds out to her
With hands like hip-boots, like her father's waders,
A corsage of watercress: the white bridal-veil-lace flowers
Are shining with water-drops. In their clear depths
She sees, like so many cupids, water-babies:
Little women, little men.
