“In order to have a sense of who we are,” writes Charles Taylor, “we have to have a notion of how we have become, and of where we are going” (47). The unconscious (in psychoanalytic terms) bears traces of early experience; clinical practice moves from present experience to its roots in the recent or distant past. For these reasons and others, Jarrell’s poems often seek a past self within present experience, or a child within an adult. With help from concepts central to psychoanalysis, and from literary sources such as Wordsworth and Proust, his characters try to understand themselves as agents with inner lives by understanding how their present selves have emerged from their pasts. While Jarrell’s other stylistic signatures imagine how people (try to) relate to other people, Jarrell’s verbal repetitions bear on how his personae understand time and on how they relate to their own histories. No account of his poems can stand without an account of those repetitions and of how they help him imagine time.
I have argued that Jarrell’s poems draw on psychoanalysis and that they often focus on transference and on object-relations. An “account of psychic life,” Nancy Chodorow explains, based on “transference, projection and introjection” places its actors “in a relational world—both internally object-relational and interpersonally intersubjective” (Power 17). Such accounts (of which “Gleaning” is one) constitute a self through present others, through internal memories of those others, and through our memories of our past selves. Sophisticated descriptions of transference (Chodorow singles out Hans Loewald’s) coin compound terms that evoke both the actual past and the past as we remember it: these
formulations—“the past in the present,” “alive past,” “past unconscious” and “present unconscious,” “what was is, and what is, was,” “unconscious living past”—represent an attempt to resolve two apparently contradictory views: on the one hand, that psychic reality is created subjectively and in-tersubjectively in the here and now; on the other hand, that psychic reality … was created in the there-and-then past.
(Power 45)
These “apparently contradictory views” create some of the tensions—between helplessness and agency, between past and present—that drive Jarrell’s poems. Meredith Skura, too, credits psychoanalysis with insights into how past and present work together, concluding “that analysts are … not looking for the past but for all the ways in which the past affects the present without being recognized as doing so” (209). To seek recognition—to seek ways of being seen—is, from such points of view, to seek some way of having seen, in oneself, one’s own past. Hence come the formulae—so frequent in Jarrell—of children and young people “inside” older ones and of a felt “soul” “inside” the visible person.
Geoffrey Hartman has also written of “ghostly” feelings, feelings of nonexistence, “of being an outsider to life”; seeking cures for such feelings, “I want to know myself, not only my processes of knowing” (Fateful 21). I might have such feelings if I believed (as so many of Jarrell’s characters do) that nobody else saw or heard me as a being in my own right. I might have such feelings, too, if I believed I no longer had much in common with my younger selves—that they had authentic being, while I (my present self) did not. Object-relations theorists show how these sorts of alienation produce each other, and set out to treat both. Transference, in the models of analysis that Skura and Chodorow endorse, helps us imagine interiority by helping analysands relate past to present (and thereby “inside” to “outside”). The experience of therapy thus helps cure the feeling that one is not a person, not real, not an agent, not (or no longer) oneself.
These senses of ghostliness, self-alienation, and nonexistence, for which Jarrell’s personae seek cures, have parallels in both Anglo-American and continental philosophy, where they become problems and paradoxes about personal identity. In one sense “personal identity” means something like “psyche” or “soul”—it is the answer to the question “Who am I?” and it is meaningful to the extent that such a question can be answered, that we can conceive of someone who imagines or discovers an answer. This sense of “identity” (call it synchronic) dominates many poems we have already seen, from “Next Day” to “The Venetian Blind” to “The Sick Nought,” with their animating fear that the questions “Who is this person? What makes her unlike all others?” might not have any answer. The answers they do have may always involve our relations to other persons. For Jessica Benjamin, as we have seen, these questions can only be answered if we can imagine other persons answering them about us and ourselves answering such questions about other people.
Another kind of identity seems to depend on our past, on who we and other people have thought we were, and of how those previous entities create the people we have become. Call this identity diachronic. Richard Wolheim asks us to imagine
the conditions under which, say, a boy who once stole apples from a particular orchard and some general who, years later, won renown on a famous battlefield would be one and the same persons, and likewise, those conditions under which the boy and the general would be two different persons. That which tells us whether a and b, both f, are the very same f, that which tells us whether the boy and the general, both persons, are the very same person, are criteria of identity: every criterion of identity is relative to a particular concept—say, the concept f, the concept person—in that it fixes identity under this concept: and the philosophical intuition is that concept and criterion of identity relative to it are essentially linked. The former determines the latter.
(300)
“Concept of person” here has to do with what I have just called “synchronic identity”; “criterion of identity” has to do with “diachronic” identity. To put the same insight another way: if I want to know what makes me a person, or what makes me myself, I may well ask what makes me the same person I was ten minutes or ten years ago. And if I want to know whether I am still the person I was, I will have to decide what I mean by “person” in order to find out.
It may be intuitive, but it cannot be beyond dispute, that questions about personal identity in the sense of attribution and agency must be questions about identity in the sense of sameness over time. Paul Ricoeur distinguishes sameness in time, space, or meaning (for which he uses the term idem) from selfhood and agency (for which he adopts the term ipse). He then addresses the ways in which these concepts can be differentiated or conjoined. Ricoeur describes (with reference to idem-identity)
a criterion … of uninterrupted continuity between the first and the last stage in the development of what we consider to be the same individual. This criterion is predominant whenever growth or aging operate as factors of dissemblance. … The demonstration of this continuity functions as a supplementary or a substitutive criterion to similitude; the demonstration rests upon the ordered series of small changes which, taken one by one, threaten resemblance without destroying it. This is how we see photos of ourselves at successive ages of our life.
(117)
For some of Jarrell’s protagonists, the “uninterrupted continuity” tying their past to their present manifestations seems to them simply absent, disrupted beyond recall: they do not feel they have anything left in common with the boy or the girl they were. For other protagonists, that “continuity,” though felt, seems to them inadequate for a robust sense of self.
In these matters Jarrell’s ambitious early unpublished fragments (rather than his first, Audenesque, publications) pursue interests that would shape his later work. Fragments about his 1938 breakup with Amy Breyer already show a concern with time and duration; their pentameters struggle to represent his feeling of a life stalled or reversed. One fragment asks its “you” (evidently Breyer),
But did you care
How it would end? Wish that it could end
Except as it was, as it was, as it was? the snake
Curled tail in mouth within the rubber egg,
Living and about to live, yolk-yellow, Time
That’s stopped becoming, in the end found how to be.
As I sit here in my cooling room, alone
For a little, if I am ever, now, alone,
I think, you are here, just as you were—are, yesterday,
Are tomorrow, not always. Time—
What use are you to us? We are Time.
(Berg Collection)
How could a person “be” without “becoming”? How can we go on being the same people we were? If we change, who will miss us?
These same questions animate the characters in Jarrell’s poems of the fifties and sixties, who feel cut off from their past selves almost as frequently as (and sometimes because) they feel excluded from a life with other people. The woman in “Gleaning” insisted that somewhere inside her she could locate the girl she had been, though she had to resort to a violent fantasy life to do so. In “Thinking of the Lost World” Jarrell asks whether by growing old he has become a different person or acquired a body somehow no longer his own: “Where’s my own hand? My smooth / White bitten-fingernailed one?” (CP 338). “Women on a Bus” begins with its speaker’s repelled astonishment that “These sacks of flesh piled in a pile” could ever have been “a girl” (CP 489). That speaker, herself an aging woman, has displaced onto other passengers her fears about her own dying body. All these poems’ speakers ask how they can be the same people they were: in each, troubles with diachronic identity generate troubles with synchronic identity, and seem to preclude synchronic recognition.
To see how Jarrell’s poems work these problems out, we need to look at one more philosophical treatment. Responding to Derek Parfit’s famous thesis that “identity is not what matters,” Marya Schechtman distinguishes “the reidentification question and the characterization question. The former is the question of what makes a person at time t2 the same person as a person at time t1; the latter the question of which beliefs, values, desires and other psychological features make someone the person she is” (245; 1–2). (These seem very like Ricoeur’s idem and ipse.) The reidentification question has nothing to do with the special status, or the imputed uniqueness, of persons (it could be asked about figs, for example, or flags). The characterization question addresses that uniqueness directly: it asks not “about ‘identity’ understood as ‘the relation which every object bears to itself and to nothing else,’ but rather as ‘the set of characteristics that make a person who she is’” (75–76). And yet, Schechtman sees, “The question of whether action A is attributable to person P is obviously intimately connected to the question of whether person P is the same person as the person who performed A” (77). If I lost my ability to see my past, present, and future as all in some sense belonging to me, as the continuous experiences of one subject, I might lose my sense of personhood as well.
That ability, Schechtman shows, depends upon my relation to other people. “The very concept of personhood is inherently connected to the capacity to take one’s pace in a certain complex web of social institutions and interactions” (95). And “in order to do this, one needs … a self-concept that is basically in synch with the views of one held by others”; “one’s self-conception must cohere with … the story that those around her would tell” (95). This congruence of course admits of degrees—I can be closer or farther from the story those around me would tell of my life, just as they can disagree somewhat with one another. But our stories cannot be entirely disjunct. The philosophical definitions and the subjective, felt senses of personhood (ipse-identity) both become problematic or incoherent for people with a sufficiently extreme difference between their notions of their own experience—including their “inner lives”—and the notions others around them can have. Obvious examples of this sort of problem (the ones Schechtman gives) include people who are psychotic. Other examples are people who feel robbed of character, “empty of self” (in Enid Balint’s phrase) or struck by a “ghostly feeling” (in Hartman’s), because others’ stories about them are nothing like theirs; their inner lives have no interpersonal confirmation.
This is of course the problem of the housewife in “Seele im Raum,” of the Woman at the Zoo, of the instrumentalized soldiers standing in their lines. In Jarrell’s most intricate poems, the query “What makes me a person at all?” turns out to be inextricable from the other queries “What makes me the same person I have been, and how can I know if nobody else can tell?” Jarrell explored those links as early as the war poem “Mail Call,” where soldiers’ letters from other people constitute links to their past, hence to their senses of personhood:
Surely the past from which the letters rise
Is waiting in the future, past the graves?
The soldiers are all haunted by their lives.
Their claims upon their kind are paid
in paper That establishes a presence, like a smell.
In letters and in dreams they see the world.
They are waiting: and the years contract
To an empty hand, to one unuttered sound—
The soldier simply wishes for his name.
(CP 170)
To get a letter is to be rightly named, fixed in one’s personal history; not to get a letter is to lack “presence,” to feel like a ghost. Jarrell’s single-file, end-stopped stack of pentameters suggests the troops’ stiff, interminable wait. The poem also seems fixated on nouns that denote time: past, future, lives, years. The soldiers wish to be recognized by others, and thereby to seem continuous with the selves they have been.
As an investigator of personal identity—of Ricoeur’s idem and ipse, of the self with others and the self with its own past—Jarrell has no parallel among modern poets. His masters in such investigations were sometimes Freud and Rilke, sometimes Wordsworth and Proust. The difference between one person at one time and “the same” person at another—a difference that can make them seem like separate people—became a topic for all Jarrell’s postwar long poems. The same topic suffuses “The Elementary Scene,” a short poem Jarrell began in 1935 and finished in 1960.1 The poem presents itself as a dream, or a memory of a dream, which could be a child’s or an adult’s:
Looking back in my mind I can see
The white sun like a tin plate
Over the wooden turning of the weeds;
The street jerking—a wet swing—
To end by the wall the children sang.
The thin grass by the girl’s door,
Trodden on, straggling, yellow and rotten,
And the gaunt field with its one tied cow—
The dead land waking sadly to my life—
Stir, and curl deeper in the eyes of time.
The rotting pumpkin under the stairs
Bundled with switches and the cold ashes
Still holds for me, in its unwavering eyes,
The stinking shapes of cranes and witches,
Their path slanting down the pumpkin’s sky.
(CP 231)
Rhythmic unevenness, frequent spondees, and clangorous half rhymes (swing/ sang, ashes/witches) testify to the hardship the child felt. The vivid “scene” (a travesty of the “primal scene”) is a primary school from the early twentieth century, for this child a place of unrelieved misery: the other children seem to be singing without him, the tied-up cow to have been somehow like him, Halloween an occasion for bullying.
Thus far the poem has remained descriptive, testifying to the persistence of these images in “my mind.” As the poem rises away from the elementary school, its field and stairs and vague horrors, we see how hard it is for Jarrell to say how this memory informed an older self—and how hard it was for the child to imagine a future. Above the school (and in longer, much more fluid, lines),
Its stars beckon through the frost like cottages
(Homes of the Bear, the Hunter—of that absent star,
The dark where the flushed child struggles into sleep)
Till, leaning a lifetime to the comforter,
I float above the small limbs like their dream:
I, I, the future that mends everything.
Is the dreamer child or adult? Does the tormented young Jarrell dream that the older Jarrell will justify his sufferings? Or does the older Jarrell reexamine that dream?
An earlier version of the poem (with the same title) appeared in the first issue of Southern Review, in 1935. The earlier poem joined the same first three stanzas to an entirely different concluding sentence:
And even here, the patched comforter,
The white iron bed,—creak to me,
Their forms contorted, waiting, still,—
That world, silent, drowned in time,
Regret turning, Grief with its nails.
(“Two Poems” 86)
This ending is less ambiguous (and less powerful) because it places the poem securely in the adult’s dream. There the adult in his (too small) bed remembers the child’s misery, now “drowned in time”; the elementary-school world acquires the aspect of a recurring bad dream.
The later poem thus complicates the earlier, refusing to solve the problem at its center: is the child the adult remembers “the same” as the adult the child once hoped to become? Drafts of the poem from the 1950s give it the working title “The Child’s Dream/Sleep” (UNC-Greensboro). Mary Kinzie argues that the later version of the poem “rejects the child’s point of view to speak from the adult’s” in the last two lines (84). The point of view they create, in which Jarrell speaks of himself as his own future, becomes remarkable partly for its merging of the child’s remembered point of view and the adult’s newer, less agonized, take on the same images. A reader who knew both the old and the new versions might even liken the ambiguities between adult and child consciousness to the partial merger Jarrell has accomplished between the old and the new poem. With its altered, “mended” ending, is “The Elementary Scene” of 1960 a new, mature poem? Or is it “the same” as a work by a much younger poet, who gives it a different ending now that he has become his own “future”? In the 1960 poem the adult has “mend[ed] everything,” yet the adult relates to the child only as our separable emotions and memories relate to us. He has in a sense been created by the child. Yet he is helpless to confer on the child the skills and defenses he has acquired, because he is no longer that person: they may not seem the same even in dreams.
These matters of memory, identity, and growth are Wordsworthian, philosophical, and psychoanalytic, but above all they are Proustian. Jarrell labeled Proust in 1951 “the greatest of the writers of this century”; later poems refer to him by name and imply that Jarrell reread him often (Age 26).2 The hard to fathom links between past and present, child and grownup, in “The Elementary Scene” appear through the temporal ambiguities of a dream. Such “extraordinary effects which [dreams] achieve with Time” are experiences Marcel considers:
Have we not often seen in a single night, in a single minute of a night, remote periods, relegated to those enormous distances at which we can no longer distinguish anything of the sentiments which we felt in them, come rushing upon us with almost the speed of light as though they were giant aeroplanes instead of the pale stars which we had supposed them to be, blinding us with their brilliance and bringing back to our vision all that they had once contained for us, giving us the emotion, the shock, the brilliance of their immediate proximity, only, once we are awake, to resume their position on the far side of the gulf which they had miraculously traversed, so that we are tempted to believe—wrongly, however—that they are one of the modes of rediscovering Lost Time?
(3:950)
“The Elementary Scene” seeks just the effects Proust claims to reject: Proust’s stars may even be the stars in the 1960 poem. The unity of past and present, outer and inner, selfhood that dreams and spoken exchanges (for Jarrell) create is famously reserved, in Proust, for the coincidental triggering “impressions” (such as the madeleine dipped in lime-leaf tea) by which selfhood may begin to be salvaged from Time. Marcel decides in the last volume of A la recherche that such “diverse happy impressions” had
this in common, that I experienced them at the present moment and at the same time in the context of a distant moment, so that the past was made to encroach upon the present and I was made to doubt whether I was in the one or the other. The truth surely was that the being within me which had enjoyed these impressions had enjoyed them because they had in them something that was common to a day long past and to the present, because in some way they were extra-temporal, and this being made its appearance only when, through one of these identifications of the present with the past, it was likely to find itself in the one and only medium in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say: outside time.
(3:904)
Though he might not call them “outside time,” such experiences are just those Wolheim invokes as tests of identity. Jarrell would use his own memory triggers of taste and smell in his longest autobiographical poem, The Lost World.
If “90 North” began Jarrell’s investigations of intersubjective recognition, “The Elementary Scene” inaugurated his explorations of diachronic identity. Those explorations included poems about adults’ memories of childhood, as well as other poems about aging and old age. Jarrell’s line of poems about aging begins in the early forties, with “The Christmas Roses”: it becomes newly visible with “The Face” (1948), a poem written (Jarrell told Elisabeth Eisler) in “a style quite different from my usual style”—one derived from his new interest in Rilke (Letters 206).3 Its nameless speaker says her face is
Not good any more, not beautiful—
Not even young.
This isn’t mine.
Where is the old one, the old ones?
Those were mine.
(CP 23)
Old and young have somehow been reversed: her younger face has become “the old one” in the sense that it is her former face, and her new face, since it looks old, seems to her not hers.4 The woman continues:
It’s so: I have pictures,
Not such old ones; people behaved
Differently then … When they meet me they say:
You haven’t changed.
I want to say: You haven’t looked.
It is as if her aging body had moved forward into the present moment, while her psyche had stayed behind. The people who say to her “you haven’t changed” make her feel even worse, since it is not something we say to the young. An exact precedent is the party where Madame de Guermantes reën-counters Marcel:
“As for you,” she continued, “you are always the same, you never seem to change.” And this remark I found almost more painful than if she had told me that I had changed, for it proved—if it was so extraordinary that there was so little sign of change in me—that a long time had elapsed. “Yes,” she said, “you are astonishing, you look as young as ever,” another melancholy remark, which can only mean that in fact, if not in appearance, we have grown old.
(3:970.)
Jarrell’s speaker feels that she has changed radically, has become a different person, merely because she has aged. This feeling is by no means unique to the old: children can think of themselves that way, too, though children (as in “The Elementary Scene”) often believe their future selves will improve on the present. “The Face” recalls such beliefs with raw regret:
This is what happens to everyone.
At first you get bigger, you know more,
Then something goes wrong.
You are, and you say: I am—
And you were … I’ve been too long.
Rilke’s “Faded,” which Jarrell translated, resembles “The Face” but ends on a different note: its old woman tidies her room because “the very same young girl” she was “May be, after all, still living there” (CP 480). Jarrell’s woman feels that she cannot possibly be, or be seen as, “the very same” in any sense. She feels, as she sounds, hollowed out, helpless, anomic: “I’ll point to myself,” she promises or remembers, “and say: I’m not like this. / I’m the same as always inside. / And even that’s not so.”
Like “Next Day,” but more obviously so, “The Face” is what Laura Quinney has termed a poem of disappointment (as opposed to disillusion): the loss it describes cannot possibly be recuperated or compensated by psychic reinvestment or symbolic consolation, because what is lost is a sense of the worth of the self that can be consoled. Quinney writes that in such a poem, “the disappointed subject is panicked by the barren prospect of time, but also feels subject to time because the self stripped of ontological grandeur—and therefore of the assumption that it is a permanent essence—no longer expects to transcend time, but sees itself as agglutinated, dissolved, and rearranged in time” (8). Time itself seems to the woman in “The Face” to have deprived her of most of her interiority, leaving her room only for abstract complaint. The poem is so thoroughly disappointed, so deprived of objects and points of reference, that it has to conclude somewhat blankly and anticlimactically: “If just living can do this, / Living is more dangerous than anything: // It is terrible to be alive.” Simply because her face has grown old, she feels she has lost the continuity of personal identity that made her meaningful to others, thence to herself.
Something similar but more complicated has happened in “A Ghost, a Real Ghost,” which Jarrell called “one of the most personal poems I ever wrote” (Letters 305). Here the speaker is far less developed in terms of specific biography, social context, physical features. We do not even know if the “I” of the poem is dead or alive, a man or a woman. (I call the speaker “she” for convenience.) Yet this speaker tells us far more about herself and her preoccupations than the operagoer of “The Face” could. She lives in a world of remembered songs and places but can no longer belong to a present moment. She cannot even see herself in the mirror, as she tells us late in the poem:
The first night I looked into the mirror
And saw the room empty, I could not believe
That it was possible to keep existing
In such pain: I have existed.
(CP 262–263)
Perhaps she is now a “real ghost” or even a vampire (like the vampire in Jarrell’s “Hohensalzburg”); perhaps, instead, a beloved partner has left (the bedroom mirror shows an empty room). Most plausibly, the sentence may mean that because this speaker has grown old, when she looks into the mirror she no longer sees herself, only a face that seems not to belong to her.5
In all these interpretations the poem investigates criteria of identity; it shows how we know we exist by knowing that whoever we were is still who we are. When those criteria are removed, the result is an unassimilable shock to the self, in which interiority, imagination, and desire seem to have become segregated from the person who is feeling them. To search for oneself in a mirror is a commonsense response, but it is one that cannot rescue the lost self. Jarrell’s “Ghost” behaves like another of Winnicott’s patients, of whom Winnicott writes:
We discussed the way in which talking to oneself does not reflect back (on one’s sense of self) unless this is a carry-over of such talking having been reflected back by someone not oneself.
She said: “I’ve been trying to show you me being alone … that’s the way I go on when alone, though without words at all, as I don’t let myself start talking to myself” (that would be madness).
She went on to talk of her use of a lot of mirrors in her room, involving for the self a search by the mirrors for some person to reflect back. (She had been showing me, though I was there, that no person reflects back.) So now I said: “It was yourself that was searching.” … I meant that she exists in the searching rather than in finding or being found.
She said, “I’d like to stop searching and just BE. Yes, looking-for is evidence that there is a self.”
(63; italics in original)
Winnicott’s studies show, and Jarrell’s poems enact, the ways in which problems about imperiled selfhood are problems about interaction: in order to be sure we have selves, we require that others notice the links between who we are now and who we were.
Problems of “evidence that there is a self”—of its continuity across time, and of its presence for others—are perhaps Jarrell’s central subject, from “90 North” through “Jerome” to his very last poems. Where they lack both solutions and etiologies, they are difficult experiences (as “The Face” showed) to render vivid or concrete in a short poem, because they involve a speaker cut off from the physical world of objects and details. Jarrell surmounted that difficulty in “The Face” by borrowing a generalizing, terse style from the early Rilke. His more original solution in “A Ghost” is to devote three-fifths of the poem to an analogy, the story of an (or another) “old woman,” who also loses her criterion of identity. The “I” who begins the poem does nothing except “think,” react, and “know” for the first three stanzas of the five-stanza poem, since she is concentrating on that analogy:
I think of that old woman in the song
Who could not know herself without the skirt
They cut off while she slept beside a stile.
Her dog jumped at the unaccustomed legs
And barked till she turned slowly from her gate
And went—I never asked them where she went.
(CP 262)
The old woman cannot “know herself” because she has been deprived of the criteria (visual similitude over time, and recognition by a companion) that established her continuity in time. Since “that old woman” is a figure from a tale, the criteria are simplistically physical (a skirt), the companion a dog, the exile geographic rather than psychic.
This self-exile again suggests the experiences of children, who also seem to trade one self for another:
The child is hopeful and unhappy in a world
Whose future is his recourse: she kept walking
Until the skirt grew, cleared her head and dog—
Surely I thought so when I laughed. If skirts don’t grow,
If things can happen so, and you not know
What you could do, why, what is there you could do?
I know now she went nowhere; went to wait
In the bare night of the fields, to whisper:
“I’ll sit and wish that it was never so.”
I see her sitting on the ground and wishing,
The wind jumps like a dog against her legs,
And she keeps thinking: “This is all a dream.”
This wishful old woman (like the woman in “Gleaning”) behaves like a travesty of the biblical Ruth: she will sit out in the cold fields, skirtless, forever, because she has lost what makes her herself, and nobody will arrive to redeem her. And as dog is to wind, so is this old woman to the “ghost” who speaks the poem, of whose loss that woman is only the symbol. The poem ends:
Was the old woman dead? What does it matter?
—Am I dead? A ghost, a real ghost
Has no need to die: what is he except
A being without access to the universe
That he has not yet managed to forget?
(CP 263)
This poem finds (as several of Jarrell’s most affecting poems fail to find) a formally effective, convincing way to end a poem of disappointment without betraying its central pessimism: it ends with a unanswerable question, not about the solutions for this sort of disappointment (there are none) but about its causes and how to interpret them. Under what circumstances might I ask whether I were “dead”? I might be “undead,” a “real ghost,” zombie, or vampire. I might also experience stigma, “social death.” The soldiers in “Mail Call” felt like ghosts because, in the army, they felt cut off from their lives. But the invisible deadness this “real ghost” feels does not stop there: what horrifies her at last is that she remembers the “universe” where she felt alive.
To feel thus is to be a ghost. And to feel shut out of a universe that we remember, a universe that defined us as persons in irretrievable ways, is not an experience as unusual as its supernatural analogues may make it seem: all adults are “ghosts” in this sense as regards childhood, and each of us is a ghost with respect to whatever phase of life we no longer occupy, can no longer fit. The adolescent who wishes to remain a presexual child, the teacher who wants to fit in with her students, the old man who wishes to regain his youthful prestige, will all feel like ghosts when they realize they cannot do so. Again, Jarrell finds poetic form for an emotional dilemma described in Proust:
just as one has difficulty in thinking that a dead person was once alive or that a person who was alive is now dead, so one has difficulty, almost as great and of the same kind (for the extinction of youth, the destruction of a person full of energy and high spirits is already a kind of annihilation) in conceiving that she who was once a girl is now an old woman … so that one might well refuse to believe that this can ever have been that … that it is the same matter incorporated in the same body, were it not for the evidence of the similar name and the corroborative testimony of friends, to which an appearance of verisimilitude is given only by the pink upon the cheeks, once a small patch surrounded by the golden corn of fair hair, now a broad expanse beneath the snow.6
(3:983)
If we were defined by our present social roles we would never feel like ghosts, nor would we feel others had become ghostly or alien, because we would never remain attached to persons who were no longer part of our everyday lives. What we had “no access to” we would “manage to forget.” But (Jarrell has maintained—has demonstrated—all along) we are not so defined: because our past selves and roles pervade present memory and imagination, we can come to identify our real selves so thoroughly with now unavailable persons, roles, behaviors as to feel stranded, unknowable, unreal. Where Marcel wants to rescue interiority from Time, the people Jarrell depicts want not to live outside time but to live with others in it. And what Jarrell does for these Proustian concerns is what lyric does with all concerns: fears about diachronic identity acquire in “A Ghost, a Real Ghost,” with its analogies, sharp breaks, and unanswered questions, not only another character to enact them but formal correlatives with which they make themselves felt.
One of those correlatives is repetition. As with “Next Day,” “The Black Swan,” and “Jerome,” one can reread the poem many times without noticing its repeated words: in the first three-and-a-half stanzas, “went” (lines 6, 12), “skirt” (lines 2, 9, 10), “so” (lines 11, 15, 20, 21), “ghost” (the title and line 22). Not only the repetitions but the six-line stanzas suggest that the poem works (as did “Jerome”) rather like a sestina. James Cummins has claimed that the repeated words in a sestina “are signposts—each time you come around to them you are aware (one of their very important functions is to make you aware) of the passage of time: this word is the ‘same,’ but only in the sense [that] a human being is the same at different ages” (156). In a true sestina the cycle of words marks time with some regularity: their felt continuity may stand for the continuity of a life. Here, however, between “The first night” and the second “existed,” no key word recurs. “A Ghost, A Real Ghost” presents a human being who feels she may not be the same, simply because she has aged. In consequence the repeated-word signposts, different and yet the same, drop out of the poem when that alienated human being enters. When the armature of repetitions returns (“existing … existed,” “dead … dead,” “ghost … ghost”), the question they suggest is the question the speaker asks: in what sense, if any, am I the same person I was? Jarrell may have learned to use these effects by writing sestinas early in his career. He would use other effects of repetition for other poems about the passage of time in a life.
Jarrell’s many uses of repetition were the one element of his verse style not discussed at length in chapter 1, because they so often depend on the ways—reserved for this chapter—in which Jarrell’s poems address the passage of time. We can now look again at Jarrell’s repetitions and at other poems they control. Those poems will lead us, in turn, back to the lessons he took from psychoanalysis. Joseph Frank has shown how modernist writers such as Eliot and Joyce used words as if they existed in space, not in time: the “meaning-relationship” in The Waste Land “is completed only by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relation to each other when read consecutively in time” (15). Against such high modernist concepts of literary works as spatial wholes, Jarrell insisted in “Levels and Opposites” that
the poem is completely temporal, about as static as an explosion; there are no things in a poem only processes. Even its score on the page is not, really, either spatial or static; we might call that, parodying the old definition of matter, the permanent possibility of a certain temporal series of perceptions.
(697)
The lecture anticipates Stanley Fish’s later insistence that we hear a poem as “no longer an object, a thing-in-itself, but an event” (Text 27).
Jarrell’s own poems depend on the properties they possess as events in time. “Speech rhythms,” George Steiner writes, “punctuate our sensation of time-flow”; “the current of language passing through the mind” can thus “contribute … to the definition of ‘interior time’” (136–137). Every meaningful concept of time, Norbert Elias argues, depends on the use of one sequence of events to measure another: “timing operations connect … two or more different sequences of continuous changes, one of which serves as a timing standard for the other (or others)” (72). Iterable events in works of art can both mark, and stand for (because they mark) time, just like the ticks of a watch or the bursts of a geyser. In the war poem “O My Name It Is Sam Hall,” a group of prisoners and their guard measure time by the military music, the stop-and-go pace of a prisoners’ march, and the slower pace of the song that gives the poem its name. The poem’s military prisoners and their guard know that they resemble one another (since they are all subordinated to the army) more than they differ (as captives and captor): all four men roam a landscape that anticipates the plain in Auden’s “Shield of Achilles,” and all experience time’s passage in the same way. They and the rest of their detachment say nothing, and all hear the same grating, public, predictable music:
They listen once more to the band
Whose marches crackle each day at this hour
From the speakers of the post.
The planes drone over; the clouds of summer
Blow by and are lost
In the air that they and the crews have conquered—
But the prisoners still stand
Listening a little after the marches.
Then they trudge through the sand …
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
They graze a while for scraps; one is whistling.
When the guard begins
Sam Hall in his slow mountain voice
They all stop and grin.
(CP 166)
Against the marches and the PA system, predictable messages from a remote authority, Jarrell sets first a prisoner’s isolate “whistling” and then the song the guard sings. Jarrell’s note preserves the words to the song: “O my name it is Sam Hall / And I hate you one and all / Yes I hate you one and all / God damn your eyes” (CP 9–10). Guard and prisoners hear the same public music, obey the same authorities, and finally resent them in the same way, setting their own private music against those impositions: the guard’s song, crystallizing a shared resentment, seems to give him the power to stop time.7
The significant “timing standards” in Jarrell’s poems include not only speech rhythms and rhythmic breaks, interpolated songs, and narrated events but also repeated phrases and words.8 And these standards can in turn raise questions, or evoke emotions, about the flow and shape of time. In Jarrell’s early sestina “A Story,” verbal repetitions mimic the frustrated impatience of a schoolchild:
What do the students talk about all day?
Today the dean said: “There’s a new boy lost.”
He said it to the matron, I could hear their
Footsteps in the corridor, but it was empty.
I must tell them what I heard those people say.
When I get up I’ll tell the other boys.9
(CP 131)
Jarrell invented other forms with repetends for other poems about World War II; in these (“Goodbye, Wendover; Goodbye, Mountain Home,” for example) the cycling words and phrases usually depict the repetitiveness of army life. In the postwar poem “Hope” (the first of two with that title) repetitions also track the unsatisfying passage of time:
The week is dealt out like a hand
That children pick up card by card.
One keeps getting the same hand.
One keeps getting the same card.
(CP 111)
The repeated words here, the repeated, too similar days, make unsatisfactory substitutes for the new letters children hope to find in the post.
Using irregular repetitions of word and phrase as governing principles, later poems scrutinize our experience of speech, companionship, selfhood, and time. The near-sonnet “Well Water” is one such poem:
What a girl called “the dailiness of life”
(Adding an errand to your errand. Saying,
“Since you’re up …” Making you a means to
A means to a means to) is well water
Pumped from an old well at the bottom of the world.
The pump you pump the water from is rusty
And hard to move and absurd, a squirrel-wheel
A sick squirrel turns slowly, through the sunny
Inexorable hours. And yet sometimes
The wheel turns of its own weight, the rusty
Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear
Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands
And gulp from them the dailiness of life.
(CP 300)
In the poem’s two versions of time (of “the dailiness of life”) the first leaves us feeling treated solely as means (as “a means to / A means to a means”); the second lets us feel recognized as ends. The first involves our limbs but not our faces, and it seems solitary even when it is not. The second feels like nourishment, like refreshment, like having something touch and revive our faces, and it permits interjections (“so cold!”) as if it brought us into a speaking relation with another human being. “Well Water” divides neatly at “And yet,” where the mode of experience, the pace, and the rhetoric change; drafts of the poem even place asterisks there (Berg Collection). (In Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” and Frost’s trochaic near-sonnet “For Once, Then, Something”—two precedents for “Well Water”—the cold, clear water refuses the poets exactly the human companionship, the sense of common purpose, Jarrell describes.)
The bisected poem imagines a difference between being treated as a means and feeling recognized as an end. This difference is also a difference between two ways of experiencing time—one Jarrell names as “inexorable hours,” another he describes by portraying a single instant. These alternatives emerge through patterns of repeated words—“errand,” “means,” “well,” “pump,” “squirrel.” Jarrell’s second sentence ends in vowels of long quantity (squirrel, through, sunny, inexorable) and in consonant clusters that slow the lines down as the errands Jarrell imagines grow more draining. When the poem shifts to the kind of experience, the kind of time, that seems to be its own reward, the lines speed up; those clusters give way to strings of r’s and l’s. When the phrase “the dailiness of life” returns, it refers not to the first (unsatisfying) kind of experience but to the second (summed up in the exclamation): its sense and thus its affect have been transformed.
Allen Grossman has argued that time scales in poems always figure the human lifespan: “the first words of every poem locate the speaker in the poem at a point of recurrence … or of recognition of synchronicity (the all-at-onceness of experience)” (257). From this aoristic point the poem unfolds in time: at the end of a poem “all the elements are unexchangeable and have come to the end of all their histories” (275). Moreover (Grossman continues) “time asymmetry opens out the possibility, which is fundamental to the usefulness of poetry, of experimenting with the situation of having chosen or having no more choices” (275–276; italics in original). Reaching the end of a poem is like having lived all one’s life.
That analogy, available in principle to all poems, does symbolic work in Jarrell’s poems, because his style takes advantage of it. Many of Jarrell’s speakers, many of his poems, declare themselves to be about “having no more choices”: their adulthood and their inability to “get themselves changed” (as Kinzie puts it) seem inseparable (70). Even as they describe such feelings, poems such as “Well Water” present other, more hopeful or less frustrating ways to experience time. The fluid present tense of dreams offers one such scale; the moment-by-moment time of conversation, of interpersonal exchange, amounts to another. We have seen in “A Ghost, A Real Ghost” Jarrell’s uses of time scales and repetitions to imagine the course of a life. Jarrell’s last word on these subjects, and his most elaborate use of time scales and repetitions, is “The Player Piano.” The poem deserves to be quoted whole:
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.
(CP 354–355)
One of Jarrell’s last and best poems about the life course, “The Player Piano” is also one of his last and best poems built around repetitions. Jarrell’s recapitulating speaker returns to “Pancake House,” “home,” “brush,” “baby,” “blame,” “look,” and finally “play,” which garners new meanings with each occurrence. The speaker no longer plays (is no longer a child; no longer entertains fictions) except in memory. She used to pretend (play) to play the piano. And her playing (the player piano) bears the same relation to playing (a musical instrument) that children’s playing and wishing (about the shape and meanings of their adult lives) has to the lives adults actually live. The waltz, “played” by the piano itself, “plays itself out,” comes to an end, literally unrolls, as the speaker’s life approaches its end and as the poem approaches its own. (The word play with all its available meanings, takes on similar roles in a late fragment: “Play me again to show that I was played,” Jarrell writes there, “Really played once. / Was I really?” [CP 490])
Why does the encounter in the Pancake House spark the retrospect that takes over “The Player Piano”? One answer is that the particular memories speaker and proprietor share remind the speaker of other memories: Fatty Arbuckle serves as her madeleine, her lime-leaf tea. Another answer, I think, is that the Pancake House proprietor resembles Jarrell’s woman, knows the history they share, enough to be able to understand her, and that this act of understanding provokes her to try to describe herself. Successfully recognizing oneself in the mirror—seeing one’s own continuity with past versions of oneself—is for Jarrell like being recognized by others (for example, like “meeting someone from home”).
“Well Water” presented two kinds of time. “The Player Piano” has three: the narrative time of a life, the instant a photograph captures (and in which we view it), and the moment-by-moment time in which a performance or conversation takes place. Photographs—“a picture of my grandson,” the photographs of parents the woman considers later in the poem—preserve likenesses at given points in time: they are not temporal art forms. Our photographed images do not change at all, but we may no longer recognize them as us. We feel linked to our own pasts (“The Player Piano” contends) neither in the instantaneous photograph nor in a sense of our lives as continuous narratives (a sense we can rarely achieve). We have to think on a shorter time scale instead—one defined by a kind of performance. The poem’s constructions invite readers to join its scene of listening, notably at the last stanza break: “Look, the keys go down by themselves!” The exclamation seems to identify the poem’s readers, or listeners, with the woman’s mother and father, listening to their little girl. In both cases what is performed—what we, or Mother and Father, listen to—seems to have been under her control but is not. We as readers have come to take the place of the woman’s (girl’s) mother and father, lending her agency by listening.
Another name for this substitution is transference. “The Player Piano” thus becomes not only Jarrell’s last word on repetition and time scales but also his last use of psychoanalysis: without the analytic hour as model for readers’ and listeners’ experience, the poem would not exist. To relive one’s early experience with a listener is to work through transference, hence to understand one’s life as a whole. The three time scales at work in the poem thus resemble the three senses of time that, for Julia Kristeva, operate during an analysis. There is “the linear time of the patient’s narrative: a time belonging to memory.” There is “the zero time of silence,” the suspension in the present moment “that marks the patient’s discourse at the same time as the analyst’s listening.” Finally there is “the time of interpretation: to give a meaning to memory, but also to the suspension of memory.” As all three time scales intersect, Kristeva writes, “temporality is multiplied, and analysts live several lives within one life” (285–286). These three simultaneously experienced time scales reappear in “The Player Piano”: the multiple sense of “play” in the closing phrases contains them all.
The poem recalls the common dream or wish to find a moment when one’s life first went wrong. For Jarrell no such moment of choice, no fall, can be found, nor could it have been averted had there been one. To be “old enough to know any better” is just to have realized that nothing we do makes a difference: it is to see one’s life as a script laid out in advance like a piano roll, to regard one’s life story as always already written, hence as pathetically separate from one’s consciousness, one’s wishes and acts of will. Citing both Erikson and Winnicott, Chodorow identifies the feeling of confirmation in one’s own identity with tragic acceptance: “At the end of an analysis, just as at the end of a life, a person, if all goes well, comes to recognize herself for who she is and has been” (Power 255). She even suggests that the sense of self that analysis gives us depends not only on our seeing our lives as a plot but also on our seeing them as the only possible plot: “Although all lives are contingent and all lives, in some sense, could have been other than they are, ego integrity requires seeing this as not the case” (Power 258). And this is just what happens at the end of “The Player Piano”; selfhood, individual identity, seems to come for this woman from her and our realization that she could not have become other than who she is.
The figure of the piano roll, sounding as parents and child hear its music, reconciles this woman to her “played out” life because it gives her a feeling of recognition and thus of continuous identity, which can survive her sense of helplessness. She has been to her own life as the player piano is to its score—the instrument of its unique expression, yet powerless to alter its plan. That ending (Elizabeth Bishop called it “marvelous”) invites us to help Jarrell’s woman recognize herself, to situate ourselves in her scene of listening and to experience time and inevitability along with her (One Art 433). Pritchard says rightly that in the conclusion an “as-if moment of play [has] occurred” (312). Yet the source of its power is not the “magical piano” but the situation in which we imagine we listen, in which she seems—by all manner of conscious fictions and rather as in an analysis—to have been heard (312).
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)
As the lines shrink and expand, they focus on the girl at the poem’s center; the poem moves from third person to first-person plural to first-person singular. The girl is like the cat in not wanting to move, and Jarrell adopts her voice and her fears:
Butter the cat’s paws
And bread the wind. We are moving.
I shall never again sing
Good morning, Dear Teacher, to my own dear teacher.
Never again
Will Augusta be the capital of Maine.
The dew has rusted the catch of the strap of my satchel
And the sun has fallen from the place where it was chained
With a blue construction-paper chain.…
The verses focus on their shortest line, “Never again,” and follow it up with a Forties schoolgirl’s apocalypse: Maine disappears, the sun falls into the blue sea, and
Never again will Orion
Fall on my speller through the star
Taped on the broken window by my cot.
My knee is ridged like corn
And the scab peels off it.
The knee scab (and the tree-climbing elsewhere in the poem) are hints of “tomboyism”: the girl in the poem has not yet had to assume any kind of adult sexual role. Judith Halberstam has claimed that in “popular cinema … tomboyism represents a resistance to adulthood itself rather than to adult femininity” (6). Like the movies Halberstam summarizes, “Moving” uses childhood androgyny as a way of thinking less about gender than about age. Girlhood seems to serve Jarrell as a double foil for adulthood and for masculinity—in this sense tomboys make the best girls. The girl’s knee scab links her to the older woman of “The Player Piano” who asks “How long has it been since I … got a scab on my knee?” (CP 354) Like the girl in “Moving,” Jarrell’s adults fear that growing older will mean the end of their world.
Adults, however, can usually distinguish among brute facts (seven stars can be seen in the night sky), social or consensual facts (we call those stars, in English, “Orion”), and fictions (Orion is a hunter with a bow). Adults also know what sort of statements depend for their truth on who utters them (“I live in Augusta,” “My knee hurts”) and what sorts of statement are not contingent in that way (“Augusta is the capital of Maine”). The girl’s charm, and the poem’s, lies in her failure to hew to these distinctions. This inability lets her thoughts and fears illustrate a more general anxiety about growing up and moving from one phase of life or one role to another.
Everyone in Jarrell who feels this anxiety responds in at least one of three modes. They embrace fictions that simulate intimacy. They seek intimacy (with other people and with cats). Finally, they try desperately to link current selves to past selves, to establish an interior continuity between past and present experience—a continuity that mitigates their altered social roles. The girl in “Moving” tries all three mental strategies, for which the poem finds forms. First she makes up a fairy-tale destination continuous with the tales she knows: “We are going to live in a new pumpkin,” she decides, “Under a gold star.” As her house recedes—and along with it the fictions of witches and stars—Jarrell returns to the third person, mapping the girl’s seeming distance from her old self:
The cat is dragged from the limb.
The little girl
Looks over the shoulders of the moving-men
At her own street;
And, yard by lot, it changes.
Never again.
But she feels her tea-set with her elbow
And inches closer to her mother;
Then she shuts her eyes, and sits there, and squashed red
Circles and leaves like colored chalk
Come on in her dark head
And are darkened, and float farther
And farther and farther from the stretched-out hands
That float out from her in her broody trance:
She hears her own heart and her cat’s heart beating.
She holds the cat so close to her he pants.
(CP 94)
Here the girl behaves like a subject of Winnicott’s, clutching “significant others” and “transitional objects” in order to know she is still the same person she was.11 (To listen to one’s own heartbeat is to look for a measure of self and time independent from place: her heart is the same heart and beats in the same chest, no matter where she lives—though it also beats faster and louder the more apprehensive she becomes.) As the moving truck rolls farther away from the house, the lines stretch “farther and farther” too, moving inside the truck and then inside the girl’s imagination. The same lines pick up echoes and half rhymes that suggest (without resolving into) terza rima: mother/ red/ chalk/ head/ farther/ hands/ trance/ beating/ pants (which rhyme abcbadded). A child’s valediction to her house has become a poem about a perilous—even a purgatorial—symbolic journey. The girl moves toward understanding herself as a being who persists in time—a knowledge that creates a terrible (“broody”) loneliness when others fail to confirm it.
The child’s problem in “Moving” vis-à-vis her earlier child-self duplicates the adults’ problems in other Jarrell poems: how do I establish my continuity with earlier versions of myself? If I cannot establish that continuity, what am I? And if I can so establish a self, how can I avoid the awful loneliness that comes when nobody else will recognize and confirm that self? Jarrell’s techniques in “Moving,” as in “The Elementary Scene” and “A Ghost”—with their shifting pronouns and speakers, their moves away from and toward the protagonist’s consciousness—adapt themselves to these Proustian questions. They do so in part by borrowing from the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, which helps them depict fluctuations between conscious thought, hypnogogic drift, and dream states. And the lines’ continuities from figure to figure, phrase to phrase, scene to scene come to suggest the larger questions about the continuity of personal identity—what we can “hold … close to us,” what will come “Never again”—raised by Jarrell’s fears and dreams.
This chapter has examined some psychoanalytic and philosophical bases on which Jarrell’s poems considered the identities of persons, both their status as agents and their continuity over time. The next two chapters view Jarrell’s use of kinds of persons. We have seen how Jarrell’s children resemble his adults, how his women resemble his men, and how his poems dramatize problems any human subject might have. How are the children in Jarrell unlike adults? How are women, for him, unlike men? Jarrell’s poetry can imagine them as different and their differences, sometimes, as socially constructed. He depicts both natural families—which he tends to regard as dangerously rigid—and adoptive or simulated families, in which (as Mary Jarrell and Richard Flynn have insisted) he tends to rejoice. These kinds of persons and the families they form will lead us back to Jarrell’s dealings with selfhood—how it comes about, what it requires, and why it matters after all.