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PAR.TISAN REVIEW
ever are." A lost child's search for Mother or Father - the clear, homely
simplicity of Jarrell's loneliness lies at the heart of the war poems. His
search for origins figures as a source of hidden power for some of his
most objective, most intensely personal writing.
This loneliness haunts the lost bomber-pilot children who search for
the Mother-Carrier strafed and torpedoed into flames. They find instead
the ghostly Father incarnated in the weapons themselves. Garrell's equa–
tion in "Home Burial" of male sexuality with will, and of will with the
murderous force that shapes soldiers, underlies this connection.) The
tracers wriggle like sperm and the fighters appear "like the apparition,
death," in the great glass dome of the bomber's gun turret. Jarrell dis–
places death onto machines; or he sees it as the unconsciousness of sleep;
or as an abstraction synonymous with the authority of the State. Death
never comes to Jarrell's oldiers with the brute, bitter finality displayed in
Wilfred Owen's poem, "Asleep":
Sleep took him by the brow and laid him back.
And in the happy no-time of his sleeping
Death took him by the heart. There was a quaking
Of the aborted life within him leaping ...
Then chest and sleepy arms once more fell slack.
In Jarrell, there is nothing so physically - or sexually - graphic; he
reserves that for the deaths of the planes themselves: Male orgasm as de–
struction underlies this imagery: "The red wriggling tracers/ . .. hunt
out the one end they have being for,l Are metamorphosed into one
pure smear/ Of flame, and die/ In the maniacal convulsive spin/ Of the
raider with a wing snapped off, the plane/ Trailing its flaming kite's tail
to the wave." As befits a mechanized war, the dead pilot inside vanishes
into the details of the plane's destruction.
Even when Jarrell envisions the death of a pilot, instead of really dy–
ing with quaking and convulsions like Owen's sleeping soldier, the pilot
has a moment of recognition - and then
doesn't
die : " ... the pilot,!
Drugged in a blanket . .. / Knows, knows at last; he yawns the chat–
tering yawn/ Of effort and anguish, of hurt hating helplessness - / Yawns
sobbingly, his head falls back, he sleeps." Jarrell's sobbing pilot could be a
child crying himself to sleep: Having suffered the global tantrum of the
war, he realizes the full anguish of his own helplessness. And while he
comes face to face with oblivion, his war seems another order of experi–
ence from the war of Owen's soldier, the "aborted life within him leap–
ing": At least the pilot's war includes moments, terrible though they may
be, of self-recognition . In Owen's war, his soldiers - with the cruelest,
most irremediable irony - often simply die.
