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I
POETRY
157
the myopic eye of anguish, not only seriously distort the observed world
but threaten to obliterate it. The exhibition of an obsession may, for a
time, provide a reader with a voyeuristic
frisson.
But in the long run any
fixation is apt to alienate its witness. The old cliche is inevitable: Miss
Plath's strength is her weakness; impulses that individuate her thrilling
talent are the same impulses that shrink the limits of a commanding
achievement. Anything pursued far enough is likely to turn into its op–
posite: a shriek maintained for eighty-five pages becomes, to say the least,
a bore. Nevertheless, what we have here is not, as some bewildered critics
have claimed, the death rattle of a sick girl, but the defiantly fulfilling
measures of a poet. Taken in small-one is almost forced to say, medi–
cinal-doses, she is a marvel.
The
Lost World
of Randall Jarrell is really two worlds: first, the
world of childhood, distilled by memory and made exotic by a register
of minutiae close to total recall; then the world unclaimed, territories of
imagination glimpsed in precious or frightening moments, perpetually im–
minent. Consciousness is itself a kind of anguish here, but anguish also
has its specific sources-in a realization that the worst fears of the child
all come true, in a conviction that the operations of the adult intelligence
are inadequate and often perverse.
If
innocence cannot be recovered, its
existence can at least be affirmed. The title poem provides an instance.
The master image is the famous old movie based on a sort of
Amazing
Stories
fantasy: there is a jungle plateau in South America, the result of a
geological sport, on which prehistoric life in the form, mainly, of saurian
monsters, continues its prehistory. Its extinct creatures are of course Holly–
wood artifacts, both in the movie and in the poem, but in their way they
are also emblems of Eden. The man, remembering the child, sees them this
way:
"On
Melrose a dinosaur / And pterodactyl, with their immense pale
/ Papier-mache smiles, look over the fence / Of The Lost World." Yet
they are no more overtly important than many other things selected by
memory-no more important than "Lucky / Half wolf, half police-dog"
who could "play the piano-- / Play that he does, that is," or the dowager
neighbor's electric car in whose glass confines he took "for granted / The
tiller by which she steers, the yellow roses / In the bud vases, the whole en–
chanted / Drawing room of our progress." This world recalled exists
whole and complete, a charming museum with everything in place. The
child who once lived there has survived; all of his painful questions have
been answered, painfully. He will never ask them again.
A
trick of endowing ordinary situations with an aura of the mythical
has
always been part of Jarrell's poetic resourcefulness. A seam of fable
runs through his books, a tendency to see life in terms of
Marchen,
in
landscapes where every house is dwarfed and shadowed by the trees of
an impermeably sinister Black Forest. In this book, continuing that strain,
