Randall Jarrell

These poems were just a little depressing weren’t they? I get the sense that Mr. Jarrell did not have much hope in mankind, or in his own future. But then, he only lived what, fifty years, so perhaps he was born with a built-in sense of life-is-temporary-and-meaningless type of complex. Of the selections given, I would have to pick out “Losses” as the one I “liked” the most. In it the narrator, maybe Jarrell, maybe not, describes his experience in war and how he thinks of death. It feels like he is trying to make sense of it, not just the dying, but the dying for reasons he didn’t particularly understand. Men died in training, men died due to accidents, died because of hazards unforeseen; men barely out of training were called into replace those freshly killed, only to die as well, their bodies soon to “lay among the people [they] had killed and never seen”. Those who made it were given medals; those who didn’t were described as “losses” or “casualties”, never dead. It was hard to reconcile with death if it was never called death I suppose.