154
PARTISAN REVIEW
With great fluidity and compression Jarrell registers the stages of the
boy's mounting panic; then he shifts into third person in which he pre–
sents with skillful understatement both the boy's and Mama's conflicting
viewpoints; and then he finishes the passage in his own adult voice by
ruefully acknowledging that love is innocent only if we can explain away
the contradictions in those we love.
These superbly handled dramatic modulations carry through to the
poem's conclusion several lines later, in which Jarrell manages to regain
some equanimity through the figure of Pop. Pop as surrogate father, even
the All-Father, foils the mad scientist in the boy's magazine. He reassures
the child that the mad scientist couldn't really destroy the world: " 'No,
that's just play,! Just make-believe,' he says. The sky is gray.! We sit
there, at the end of our good day." Of course Jarrell's use of "there"
instead of "here" shows just how far the grown-up poet is from the boy.
And the historical irony of the mad scientist's make-believe isn't lost on
Jarrell, who mentions Armageddon in other poems.
Pop's failure to protect the child from the male provenance of war,
Mama's unwitting collusion in introducing the child to death and the
hypocrisies of love - these ironies hedge considerably the optimism of the
poem's last line. But if the sky is gray for the grown-up poet, his skill in
weighting the couplet in favor of "our good day" forges not only an
emblem of reconciled opposites, but expresses his adult solicitude for his
own child-self: The grown-up Jarrell knows just how provisional is any
reconciliation with the past. He decently keeps to himself his own adult
doubts in the interest of the child's momentary happiness.
In
imagining what Jarrell will mean to the future, I think back to
my own experience in that Baltimore bookstore. He seemed nearer to
me than either Bishop or Lowell, whose technique and presence in their
poems seemed unapproachably accomplished. Jarrell was baggier, his
prosody a little haphazard, his childhood, just as mine was, still close
about him. Pop the welder and my own father, who first worked for the
railroad, then ran a drive-in theater, were far more likely
to
have met
than my father and Commander Lowell; or my grandparents and
Bishop's grandparents, who seemed otherworldly rustic, almost fairy-tale
people. But it wasn't only class that made me at home in Jarrell's work.
His Great Books sensibility was inviting to a novice because of its ideal–
ism: Jarrell believed in greatness and made one aware of the gravity of
calling oneself a poet.
Each generation finds a mirror in another: The kind of poem that
Jarrell, that Bishop and Lowell wrote, seemed to me then an untapped
resource. The generation of Beats and Deep Image poets, some of them
taught by Lowell and Berryman, broke from their teachers with radical
