Two Poems by Randall Jarrell

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

—Randall Jarrell

Gunner

Did they send me away from my cat and my wife
To a doctor who poked me and counted my teeth,
To a line on a plain, to a stove in a tent?
Did I nod in the flies of the schools?
And the fighters rolled into the tracer like rabbits,
The blood froze over my splints like a scab --
Did I snore, all still and grey in the turret,
Till the palms rose out of the sea with my death?
And the world ends here, in the sand of a grave,
All my wars over? How easy it was to die!
Has my wife a pension of so many mice?
Did the medals go home to my cat?

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Aging

I wake, but before I know it it is done,
The day, I sleep. . . . And of days like these the years,
A life are made.  I nod, consenting to my life,
- But who can live in these quick-passing hours?
I need to find again, to make a life,
A child’s Sunday afternoon, the Pleasure Drive,
Where everything went by but time – the Study Hour
Spent at a desk with folded hands, in waiting.
In those I could make.  Did I not make in them
Myself? the Grown One whose time shortens,
Breath quickens, heart beats faster, till at last
It catches, skips?  Yet those hours that seemed, were endless
Were still not long enough to have remade
My childish heart: the heart that must have, always,
To make anything of anything, not time,
Not time but –
      but alas! eternity.

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You can find these poems in Jarrell’s The Complete Poems.

Randall Jarrell was a poet, novelist, critic, and teacher whose literary talent spanned a remarkable range. His voice, at once imaginative, realistic, sensitive, and ironic, left an indelible mark on American letters.

Whether exploring art, war, childhood memories, or the quiet isolation of daily life, his poetry is deeply moving and unerringly human. Known for his mastery of colloquial language and his intimate, generous style, Jarrell captured the essence of the American landscape with profound empathy. As James Atlas observed in American Poetry Review, Jarrell possessed "a broad humanism that enabled him to give voice to those who had none of their own."