BOOKS
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In another, though no less troubled escape, Jarrell sets against the
world of time his own mythical childhood. In "The Lost World" he
never directly mentions his real mother and father, the sexual, time–
bound beings that produced him. His own persona as a boy, his idealized
grandparents, Mama and Pop (already too old to be sexual, at least in
the poem), float in the ether of his precarious Eden: That Jarrell wrote
"The Lost World" in his last troubled years explains in part his desire for
an imaginative haven. But his impulse to examine the forces - sexuality
and death - that make the child father to the man keeps disrupting his
idyll. The poem's achievement lies in how skillfully Jarrell plays his
grown-up persona off his child persona to recreate the aura of his own
lost innocence.
In some of the most memorable writing of his career, he describes
Mama, "who looks with righteous lovel At all of us, her spare face half
a girl's," as she enters a chicken coop and, by wringing a chicken's neck,
unwittingly initiates her grandson into the world of time. As the chicken
lunges and reels in circles, the boy watches Mama standing "like a nunl
In the center of each awful anguished ring." The disparity between
Mama and her action is too much for the boy to fathom - he leaves this
to the grown-up Jarrell, who sees Mama "standing like Judith, with the
hen's head in her hand." Judith - the seductress and murderess of
Holofemes.
By now the polarity between nun and Judith should be familiar, al–
ready figured in Woman as playmate, wife, mother, mistress. But what
keeps Mama from becoming a straw woman is the objective manner in
which Jarrell records her actions ("She enters a chicken coop ...
I
She
chooses one,! Comes out, and wrings its neck"); and the care Jarrell
takes to keep his grown-up self from intruding on the boy's terrified re–
actions:
The thudding and scrambling go on, go on - then they fade,
I open my eyes, it's over ... Could such a thing
Happen to anyone? It cou ld to a rabbit, I'm afraid;
It
could to -
"Mama, you won't kill Reddy ever,
You won't ever, will you?" The faml woman tries to persuade
The little boy, her grandson, that she'd never
Kill the boy's rabbit, never even think of it.
He would like to believe her ... And whenever
I see her, there in that dark infinite,
Standing like Judith, with the hen's head in her hand,
I explain it away, in vain - a hypocrite,
Like all who love.
