Randall Jarrell

This morning we note the birth date of American poet, novelist and critic Randall Jarrell (May 6, 1914 – October 14, 1965) who was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

Among other honors, Jarrell was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the years 1947–48; a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, in 1951; and the National Book Award for Poetry, in 1961.

Here are two of his poems for your consideration:

The Refugees

In the shabby train no seat is vacant.
The child in the ripped mask
Sprawls undisturbed in the waste
Of the smashed compartment. Is their calm extravagant?
They had faces and lives like you. What was it they possessed That they were willing to trade for this?
The dried blood sparkles along the mask
Of the child who yesterday possessed
A country welcomer than this.
Did he? All night into the waste
The train moves silently.
The faces are vacant.
Have none of them found the cost extravagant?
How could they? They gave what they possessed.
Here all the purses are vacant.
And what else could satisfy the extravagant
Tears and wish of the child but this?
Impose its canceling terrible mask
On the days and faces and lives they waste?
What else are their lives but a journey to the vacant Satisfaction of death? And the mask
They wear tonight through their waste
Is death's rehearsal.
Is it really extravagant
To read in their faces:
What is there we possessed
That we were unwilling to trade for this?

--Randall Jarrell

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The Death Of The Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

--Randall Jarrell