The Dead Wingman -- Randall Jarrell

Guest poem sent in by Aseem

(Poem #1957) The Dead Wingman Seen on the sea, no sign; no sign, no sign In the black firs and terraces of hills Ragged in mist. The cone narrows, snow Glares from the bleak walls of a crater. No. Again the houses jerk like paper, turn, And the surf streams by: a port of toys Is starred with its fires and faces; but no sign. In the level light, over the fiery shores, The plane circles stubbornly: the eyes distending With hatred and misery and longing, stare Over the blackening ocean for a corpse. The fires are guttering; the dials fall, A long dry shudder climbs along his spine, His fingers tremble; but his hard unchanging stare Moves unacceptingly: I have a friend. The fires are grey; no star, no sign Winks from the breathing darkness of the carrier Where the pilot circles for his wingman; where, Gliding above the cities' shells, a stubborn eye Among the embers of the nations, achingly Tracing the circles of that worn, unchanging No - The lives' long war, lost war - the pilot sleeps. -- Randall Jarrell

I was planning to send in this poem for the flight theme anyway, and a
comment on a recent post made me even more determined.

William Pritchard, in his introduction to Randall Jarrell's Selected Poems
(FSG 1990) bemoans the fact that one poem, the justly celebrated 'Death of
the Ball Turret Gunner' has eclipsed all of Jarrell's other accomplishments
as a poet. The truth is that, coming out of World War II, Jarrell wrote a
number of poems about flying in the war - poems like 'The Dead Wingman', 'A
Pilot from the Carrier', 'Losses' and 'A Front'. These are not poems about
the 'lonely impulse of delight', rather they are poems about isolation,
about the helplessness of suffering; the people in them having more in
common with the disillusioned crew of Heller's Catch 22 than with Yeats'
Airman. There is no balance. There is only death.

Cut off from earthly contact in the desolation of the air, the pilot in his
plane becomes a metaphor for the soul trapped in its body. There is no
question of anything or anyone bidding the pilot to fight because the pilot
has no real choice; the sky is his only reality, and the anguish he feels
surveying the world below him is thus an existential one. The plane, like
the war (for these are, in every sense of the word, war poems) is a
death-dealing machine, one that man is strapped into, an Ixionan wheel, a
negative womb ('A Pilot from the Carrier' opens with the line "Strapped at
the centre of the blazing wheel")

'The Dead Wingman' is my favourite of these poems - in part because of the
incredible way in which Jarrell captures the physical experience of a
circling plane ("Again the houses jerk like paper, turn, / And the surf
streams by"), in part because of the perfection with which Jarrell connects
the failing of hope to external manifestations ("The fires are guttering;
the dials fall") and in part because of the way the poem, starting so
restlessly ("Seen on the sea, no sign; no sign, no sign") ends on a note of
weary, circling resignation. This is a greasy, metallic and yet deeply
moving poem. And it takes a talent like Jarrell's to keep a poem like this
aloft.

Aseem

[Links]

Biography:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randall_Jarrell

The Player Piano -- Randall Jarrell

Guest poem submitted by Sunil Iyengar:

(Poem #747) The Player Piano I ate pancakes one night in a Pancake House Run by a lady my age. She was gay. When I told her that I came from Pasadena She laughed and said, "I lived in Pasadena When Fatty Arbuckle drove the El Molino bus." I felt that I had met someone from home. No, not Pasadena, Fatty Arbuckle. Who's that? Oh, something that we had in common Like -- like -- the false armistice. Piano rolls. She told me her house was the first Pancake House East of the Mississippi, and I showed her A picture of my grandson. Going home -- Home to the hotel -- I began to hum, "Smile a while, I bid you sad adieu, When the clouds roll back I'll come to you." Let's brush our hair before we go to bed, I say to the old friend who lives in my mirror. I remember how I'd brush my mother's hair Before she bobbed it. How long has it been Since I hit my funnybone? had a scab on my knee? Here are Mother and Father in a photograph, Father's holding me.... They both look so young. I'm so much older than they are. Look at them, Two babies with their baby. I don't blame you, You weren't old enough to know any better; If I could I'd go back, sit down by you both, And sign our true armistice: you weren't to blame. I shut my eyes and there's our living room. The piano's playing something by Chopin, And Mother and Father and their little girl Listen. Look, the keys go down by themselves! I go over, hold my hands out, play I play -- If only, somehow, I had learned to live! The three of us sit watching, as my waltz Plays itself out a half-inch from my fingers. -- Randall Jarrell

Maybe because Jarrell was such an impulsive critic and essayist, he was all
the more careful to conceal the logic of his characters in poems such as
this one. Not to say that the logic of the narrator in "The Player Piano" is
obscure, only that we are lulled by a sort of pastoral until the fifth
stanza, when remorse infiltrates the poem. Considered to be his last before
Jarrell died -- in 1965, sideswiped by a car while strolling down a lonely
North Carolina lane --  "The Player Piano" begins with a charitable couplet:
"I ate pancakes one night in a Pancake House/Run by a lady my age. She was
gay." The generous tone is suggested not by the parenthetical, if halting,
remark, "She was gay," but by the short phrase that precedes it: "Run by a
lady my age."

This identification with other human beings, those who share a collective
memory, becomes the narrator's redemption. The reference to Fatty Arbuckle
and Pasadena is not so much a throwback to Jarrell's California childhood as
it is a clutching after a common likeness. The question that the narrator
asks herself, "Fatty Arbuckle/Who's that?" suggests a mischievous joy in the
"something that we had in common," something from which the reader might
feel temporarily excluded. Fishing for specimens of that "something," the
narrator trots out, a bit awkwardly, "the false armistice," or the calm
between the wars. Then follows the quaint example of "piano rolls." But the
armistice, or rather its falseness, lingers in the reader's mind and will
erupt later in the poem.

Confidences are exchanged between the narrator and the pancake lady. The
former shows her grandson's picture, a gesture that supports her
characterization of an earlier life, and her new acquaintance boasts a
modest enough accomplishment: "She told me her house was the first Pancake
House/East of the Mississippi." The combination of this provincial detail
("Pancake House") with the panoramic image, "East of the Mississippi,"
heralding the next stanza, is a quality to be admired in Jarrell's work
generally. The narrator goes home -- home to her hotel, she can't resist
adding -- and hums what sounds like a faded show tune, until we are lurched
into the present tense with "Let's brush our hair before we go to bed,/I say
to the old friend who lives in my mirror." Here our attention is commanded
not by the simple declarative sentence, nor by the substitution of "we" for
"I" in the first line, launching a new stanza, but of course by the
startlingly accurate metaphor of "the old friend who lives in my mirror."
I've never heard it used before, and it captures the sense of buried life,
an alternative existence, which the narrator invokes with the seemingly
innocent questions: "How long has it been/Since I hit my funnybone? had a
scab on my knee?"

The less said about the last three stanzas, the better. The narrator is old
and wise enough to absolve her parents from any blame in her upbringing,
after seeing them in a photo; as with the mirror, she wants to go beyond the
picture -- through the picture -- to identify with the lives therein. As for
the domestication of the armistice in Line Two, Stanza Six, and the
imperative, "Listen," in the first line of the final stanza -- what
commentary is needed? The "piano rolls" from five stanzas back resurfaces in
the titular theme, the player piano: "Look, the keys go down by themselves!"
The grown-up narrator, not the little girl sitting with her parents, holds
her fingers a "half-inch" from the keys. At the same time, she laments,
reminiscent of Kafka or Rilke: "If only, somehow, I had learned to live!"
Yet one cannot imagine many poets saying this outright, nor extracting the
fullest force of sincerity that Jarrell does. The final line evokes the
close at hand, yet unattainable; a virtual reality, one that will not submit
to the speaker's control. In closing, and with dubious relevance, I quote
the poem "Here" by Philip Larkin, of whom I am gratified to learn that
Jarrell approved: "Here is unfenced existence:/Facing the sun, untalkative,
out of reach."

Sunil.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner -- Randall Jarrell

(Poem #707) 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

[Jarrell's note to the poem]

A ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24,
and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine-guns and one man, a short small
man. When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his
bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside-down in his
little sphere, he looked like the foetus in the womb. The fighters which
attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a
steam hose.

[My own commentary]

A rather 'obvious' poem, but one that's no less powerful for that: the image
of 'the nightmare fighters' [1] attacking the cold, miserable gunner as he
crouches upside-down in his lonely turret awakens a very primal response in
the reader. The extended foetal metaphor [2] adds to the visceral effect...

thomas.

[1] brilliant phrase, that - I can picture swastikaed BF-109s and FW-190s
screaming in to attack the lumbering Fortresses and Liberators... scary.

[2] "my mother's sleep", "wet fur", "dream of life"... need I say more?

[Minstrels Links]

War Poems:
Poem #132, "Dulce Et Decorum Est", Wilfred Owen
Poem #232, "Insensibility", Wilfred Owen
Poem #288, "Futility", Wilfred Owen
Poem #321, "Strange Meeting", Wilfred Owen
Poem #385, "Base Details", Siegfried Sassoon
Poem #535, "The Working Party", Siegfried Sassoon
Poem #28, "To Whom It May Concern",     Adrian Mitchell
(Actually, 'anti-war poems' is probably a better description of most of the
above)

Sort of War Poems:
Poem #43, "Tommy", Rudyard Kipling
Poem #276, "High Flight", John Gillespie Magee
Poem #32, "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death", William Butler Yeats
Poem #395, "Naming of Parts", Henry Reed

[Random Association]

Poem #707, Boeing 707, Boeing B-17... nah, I guess I'm just sleepy.