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PAJ~
TISAN REVIEW
to this stagy Disraeli-Satan, recognizing the childish element of make-be–
lieve in the whole set-up.
But Jarrell isn't always so evasive. "The Bronze David of Donatello"
powerfully explores the homo-erotic side ofJarrell's essentially undiffer–
entiated sexual nature. In this poem Jarrell sees the statue as a metaphor
of sexual foreplay and conquest. Jarrell identifies himself with both lover
and beloved, with the sexually ambiguous, weirdly virginal, weirdly
whorish boy David (whose "ribcase, navel, nipples are the features/ Of a
face that hold us like the whore Medusa's - / Of a face that, like the
genitals, is sexless"); and with the adult-ogre's severed head on which the
boy's foot rests. Goliath, who "snores a little in satisfaction," seems as
much the boy's lover as his foe, his helmet's wing "like a swan's wing up
inside the leg," reaching "almost, to the rounded/ Small childish but–
tocks." If victory is sexual victory, Goliath is as much a conqueror as
David.
But such frankness is rare in his poems about women (as opposed to
when he speaks in a woman's voice) . In the best light, perhaps Jarrell
used stereotypes intending to explode them. As it is, they do too much
work, emotional and aesthetic, in these poems - and preserve him from
delving into the ambiguities of "our bodies/ are but as bodies are."
In Jarrell's dramatic monologues, his irony falls away, he becomes
grave, direct, open. In "Next Day," one of his finest poems, his female
persona talks about her own sexual desires as a middle-aged wife and
mother: "Now that I'm o ld , my wish/ Is womanish:/ That the boy
putting groceries in my carl See me. It bewilders me he doesn't see me."
No jokiness or smirking in this avowal. And even when Jarrell resorts to
his old standby "vile" to describe sexual fantasy ("And holding their flesh
within my flesh, their vile/ Imagining within my imagining,! I too have
taken/ The chance of life"), the irony is plangent, sadly in keeping with
this Everywoman. Having attended the funeral of her friend the day
before, she realizes that aging and death are as terrifyingly specific as her
"friend's cold made-up face, granite among its flowers. .. "
In "Next Day" the body, in consonance with Jarrell's own ambigu–
ous sexual nature, is a prison-house of shifting, almost meaningless identi–
ties: "No one has anything, I'm anybody.! I stand beside my grave,!
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary." The only es–
cape from this bleak conclusion is in a mythic world before time and
identity. In "The House in the Wood," one of Jarrell's best fairy-tale fa–
bles, " ... what was before the world/ And will be after, holds me to
its black/ Breasts and rocks me: the oven is cold, the cage is empty,! ...
the witch and her child sleep." Jarrell conjures this limbo in the unset–
tling terms of Hansel and Gretel: What will the witch-mother do to the
child if ever she should wake?
