Randall Jarrell and His Age by Stephen Burt

Author:Stephen Burt
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: LIT004020, Literary Criticism/American/General, POE005010, Poetry/American/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2003-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

A less attentive poet—or one who remembered his childhood less well—might relegate considerations of personal identity, continuity, and memory only to poems about adulthood and old age (like “A Real Ghost”), or about adults remembering childhood (like “The Player Piano”). Children in Jarrell, however, share the adults’ concerns about past and lost time, about how they can hold on to their identity absent the circumstances that helped create it. If I become a different person in different places, with different companions, in a changing body, who can I say I am? And if I remain the same in new environs, how will I stand the ensuing isolation?

These are the questions the girl in “Moving” asks. The progress of the poem—measured by a moving truck’s departure from her former home—amounts to her discovery that such questions can only be answered collaboratively, with help from other people—or from cats.10 Here is the first stanza:

Some of the sky is grey and some of it is white.

The leaves have lost their heads

And are dancing round the tree in circles, dead;

The cat is in it.

A smeared, banged, tow-headed

Girl in a flowered, flour-sack print

Sniffles and holds up her last bite

Of bread and butter and brown sugar to the wind.

(CP 93)

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