Randall Jarrell and His Age

We have seen in the “Lost World” poems and throughout Jarrell’s oeuvre how he took care to define and defend the self. We have seen how his lonely personae seek intersubjective confirmation and how his alienated characters resist the so-called social world. We have seen how Jarrell’s divided, conflicted selves depend on psychoanalytic ideas—both those of a familiar Freudianism and those of later object-relations theories. We have seen how concepts of work and play, and related ideas about childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, both inform and confine the ways Jarrell’s characters think about their lives. And we have seen how those people—among them the “Randall Jarrell” of the late autobiographical poetry—draw on Proust, Wordsworth, Rilke, Freud, and the poets and thinkers of Jarrell’s era to create a self that exists in time, one whose capacity for imagination and recognition connects who we have been to who we are.

The selfhood, or memory, Jarrell ends up “holding” in “Thinking of the Lost World” is the goal of the poem, even of a life; and yet it is worth “nothing,” can bring “no reward.” Though we can try to manifest it to others—though it seems to be “nothing” without such manifestations—the self is always “nothing” in another sense: it carries no exchange value, cannot be traded for anything, and cannot bring its private character into any public world. Other people, other readers, and even nonreaders, have their own selfhoods too: the newspaper columns are, so to speak, full of them. The LOST AND FOUND columns of “Thinking of the Lost World” remember a smaller, now vanished Los Angeles (where newspapers ran such columns), but they also look back to the newspapers imagined in Jarrell’s criticism, in one of his most often quoted passages. The relevant paragraph appeared in the Nation in 1946, where it introduced several brief, negative reviews.¹ He reprinted it, in Poetry and the Age, alone, under the heading “Bad Poets”:

The bad poets’ encapsulated lives cannot command respect as aesthetic objects—no more so than newspaper classifieds or severed limbs. They deserve respect, however, as parts of their authors’ lives, as signs of that individual experience that amounts to “nothing” yet that makes persons count as ends. Where the robotized people of Jarrell’s mass culture critique seemed distressingly empty of selfhood, the “bad poets” here (though perhaps more distressing) make clear that everyone has a self to lose.

What that famous passage about arms and legs acknowledges in “bad poets” and everyone else, as a good divorced from any formal good, is the same good that the formal intricacies of “Thinking of the Lost World” explore in Jarrell himself. It had once seemed to Jarrell a shame that an unimaginative girl’s life would “add up to yet!” (CP 18). “Thinking” declares instead that all our lives add up to “yet”: as private creations of individual, remembered experience, all lives are equally valuable or valueless. From the point of view of literature, bad poems and their authors’ lives are “nothing at all.” Yet from a less formal (or less professional) point of view those lives are the only sort of value that matters—not “use-value” or “exchange value” (as “The Night Before” articulated it) but “plain/Value.” We recognize and value other lives, as others might value ours, not because anything in particular can always be learned or taken from them, but exactly because nothing can.

Jarrell thus faces the unavoidable and unanswerable contradiction between (on the one hand) a liberal ethics founded on the equal dignity of persons and (on the other) the inevitable, and seemingly “unfair,” distinctions involved in aesthetic response. Jarrell quipped in Pictures, “Aesthetic discrimination seems no more just and rational to those discriminated against, than racial discrimination: the popular novelist would be satisfied with his income … if people would only admit that he is a better writer than Thomas Mann” (89). To be a secular leftist or a liberal, and an aesthetic critic, and a post-Wordsworthian poet—and Jarrell was all these things for all of his career—is to live aware of both human equality and human difference; it is to live with more than one mode of response to human endeavor and to be troubled by the dissonance between them. Arendt declared that “the public sphere is as consistently based on the law of equality as the private sphere is based on … difference and differentiation” (Origins 301). Though art can praise equality (just as private utterance can praise public action), the two modes of response can never be made one. In this sense (as in others), for Arendt, “the conflict between art and politics … cannot and must not be solved” (Between 218).

Depicting the inner life—but depicting it as “the nothing for which there’s no reward”; portraying isolated people and their need for others; tying itself in knots (as the girl in “The Night Before” had) about others’ bad taste and trying to reach out to them; and describing—while rejecting—public events and the public world, Jarrell’s work seems (perhaps now more than in his lifetime) unmatched as a description of that dissonance, of that unsolvable problem. It is perhaps this strongly binocular vision—his dual insistence on human equality and on aesthetic judgment—that made him matter so much to Adrienne Rich, whose words about him, written after his death, emphasize the acts of speaking and listening so central to his poetics. Rich wrote in 1967 that for her as for many other poets, “if asked that old question: ‘To what or whom do you address your poems?’ the truthful answer would be ‘To the mind of Randall Jarrell’” (RJ 183).

Trying to duplicate the messiness of real interaction between real people, and the different uncertainties of memory, Jarrell’s style explores and reinforces his efforts to manifest a recognizable self. It is that effort that helps make some of Jarrell’s poems so affecting and informs their peculiar integrity. This effort is linked to another project, a project that gives Jarrell’s poems both their peculiar sort of ethics and their ontological slipperiness. Often the poems try at once to show how an inner life, a particular selfhood, is worth everything to its possessor and how, from another point of view, it is “nothing.”² Jarrell had been exposed to such problems of value—of the uncertain status of all human value—since his days reading Wolfgang Köhler, who found that the contrast between “human experience” and “objective nature” made the resulting “problem of value … the eminent task of modern thought” (15, 36–37). Grounded both in Wordsworth’s achievement and in such psychological perspectives, Jarrell began his career uniquely prepared to see how the inner, invisible self (a self we can trace to our childhoods) is the source of “plain /Value” and yet is in practical terms invisible, unverifiable, even insignificant. The poems play up and play out this existential contrast. And this is perhaps a final reason why they care so much about, and find so many formal equivalents for, the passage of time. Empson explained in Seven Types of Ambiguity (a book Jarrell studied intently):

Jarrell’s effects involving interruption and multiple speakers govern his poems about loneliness and recognition. Effects involving pace and repetition govern poems (such as “The Lost Children,” “Thinking,” and “The Player Piano”) that combine those intersubjective concerns with others about the life course and about mortality. These poems thus invoke Empson’s “two dimensions.” In them consciousness—consciousness of our past, of other people—can seem at once to be nothing and everything, “nothing” we can have and all we need.

This effect takes over Jarrell’s most powerful war poems. Most of those poems cannot be called pacifist—but neither can it be said that they accept the war’s “Losses” as necessary, or justified. Instead, their deliberately unstable tones incorporate both the perspective, the longue durée, from which the lost lives must, objectively, be sacrificed and the minute-by-minute perspective according to which each life is everything. Jarrell describes a soldier in his prose poem “1914”: “He has been dead for months—that is to say for a minute, for a century; if because of his death his armies have conquered the world, and have brought to its peoples food, justice and art, it has been a good bargain for all of them but him” (CP 203). Either we see things from his point of view or we do not; either we credit his extinguished person with infinite value or we tally his corpse along with others—saying perhaps, as the (adult) authorities in “Losses” say, “the casualties were low” (CP 145). The most self-conscious characters in the war poems know just how these “two dimensions,” personal and impersonal, have described them. They have in common their dual awareness that they are or have been objects, instruments, and that they are not, have never been, mere objects. The airman of “Siegfried” finds himself in “warfare, indispensable / In general, and in particular dispensable, /As a cartridge, a life” (CP 149). “[I]nside the infallible, invulnerable / Machines,” he wants to come home, and to feel that he is himself again, even though such a self would “not matter”: he finally prays “let nothing I do matter / To anybody, anybody. Let me be what I was” (CP 150).

In Jarrell’s last published war poem, “The Survivor Among Graves,” living and dead, “haunters and haunted,” beg “each other” to “say again / That life is—what it is not; / That, somewhere, there is—something, something” (CP 207; italics in original). That “somewhere” is the place where inner lives, individual selves, endure and have meaning, where the equal dignity of persons is realized; it is like the “world entirely different from this,” whose “unknown … precepts we bore in our hearts,” that Proust imagined at the death of Elstir and that Jarrell invokes to end his essay “The Obscurity of the Poet” (Age 27). That other world is, at Jarrell’s most optimistic, the realm of memory, of interpersonal speech, and of shared, accomplished imaginative creations. In Jarrell’s less hopeful moods, the self has its real existence “somewhere” but only in the past or in dreams. Thus the mother in “The Lost Children,” waking from dreams of her daughters, feels “comforted / That, somewhere, they still are” (CP 301). The same work that defends the self and its needs can worry that that self is indeed “nothing”: “City, City” finds its insomniac narrator, “in yearning, // In loathing,” reaching out “to the world,” where “There is always something; and past that something / Something else: and all these somethings add to nothing” (CP 475). Jarrell’s concentration on the ways in which our selves come into being, on how they exist in time and how they become manifest to one another, made him acutely and simultaneously conscious of the sense in which an individual life is the only value and of the sense (or perspective or time scale) in which it is “nothing,” no sooner noticed than lost.

This sense gave him not only his unusual tones but his poems’ peculiar, implicit ethics—interpersonal, specific, not lawlike but driven by sympathy. But theirs is also a version of sympathy compelled to recall how hard it is to know someone else, how hard it is to believe the self is more than “nothing,” and that frequently finds itself (in consequence) unwillingly reduced from sympathy to pity. Such reductions take place in many war poems; they are captured elegantly in a 1964 lyric called “The Sign”:

The “sign” of the title is what the child paints, but it is also the whole tableau the poem yields. Child, phrase, painted sign, and kittens are presented as if they were a sufficient “sign” for the whole world. Like “The Night Before,” the poem dares readers to find it sentimental. What could be softer, soppier, than rhyming couplets about a child giving away kittens? And yet the poem leaves us with the choice of feeling (“sentimental,” extravagant, italicized) pity for these kittens or feeling that we do not feel enough—that we have become (like “The Snow Leopard” in Jarrell’s earlier poem) “heartless” before the world’s “brute and geometrical necessity” (CP 115). One might have to be a child, or else to feel childish, in order to feel intensely for the kittens. But their fate is ours as well: all of us are brought into the world, given some amount of care as we grow up, and finally left to make our own way in it. Not to care, as the child cares, for the free kitty would be to risk caring for nothing human.

In the same way, in “Terms,” not to care, as Jarrell’s “one-armed, one-legged, and one-headed” veteran cares, for the fall of one autumn leaf, might be not to care for a human life:

In the veteran’s dream, “The leaves fell one by one, like checks” (like his disability checks) “Into the grave; /And I thought: I am my own grave.” As an amputee he may feel helpless, like the leaf; before death, we may all feel so helpless—may feel, too, inconsequential and all alike. On the other hand, to be “as good as dead,” and to understand it and venture out to act among others anyway, is the human condition:

The frequent helplessness and impracticality of Jarrell’s characters—the maimed veteran, the powerless clerk, the distressed schoolgirl, the old housewife—bring into sharp focus such dilemmas about the value of the self. The poems, when they carry ethical dimensions, ask us to seek (with difficulty) the perspectives in which such subjective goods do seem real and communicable. They recommend, with difficulty, the proximity their children maintain to their cats, rather than the inhuman heights of the snow leopard, “cold, fugitive, secure” on his peak. The perspective from which we feel for others may seem strained, sentimental, childish, embarrassing, inappropriate, hard to maintain—and yet (Jarrell’s poems often insist) its alternative, indifference, would be worse.

“Washing” is rare and important among Jarrell’s late poems because it chooses indifference:

The clothes on its clothesline are like the leaves in “Terms,” wind-buffeted symbols for helplessness and mortality.³ The laundry can do nothing to help itself, but neither, ultimately, could Michelangelo; from a perspective sufficiently far removed, neither Michelangelo’s nor the laundry’s pain seems more than trivial: “Its agonies / Are heartfelt as a sneeze.” Blowing in the yard, the hanging laundry reminds Jarrell of “when Mama wrung a chicken’s / Neck” (a scene already shown in The Lost World):

The poem’s experiment with a cosmic perspective, in which human beings are no more than lost laundry, would be Frostian if it sounded more secure in its choices and its rhythms. Such a deliberately shaky approach to Frostian coldness and bareness may be what Jarrell had in mind: he found in one of Frost’s late works “a cold certainty that nothing but mercy will do for us,” though “what he really warms to is a rejection beyond either justice or mercy” (Age 35). As much as Jarrell admired, and learned from, Frost’s way with spoken language, it is this awareness of rejection, of the perspective from which the self is nothing, that his essays on Frost tend to highlight: Frost sees “the universe that is incommensurable with us,” whose “inhuman not-answer” is “a black-and-white one that is somehow not an answer at all” (Age 42, 50).

Frost knew, Jarrell wrote in another review, how “even [a life’s] salvation, far back at the cold root of things, is make-believe, drunk from a child’s broken and stolen goblet hidden among the ruins of the lost cultures” (KA 141).⁴ That reading of “Directive” makes it one of the few poems, outside Jarrell and Rilke, to understand both the importance to adult selves, and the final insignificance, of the fictions children can believe and of the different fictions adults create about childhood—fictions that the “Lost World” poems placed in their family context and went on to defend. If Jarrell answers Frost’s magnificently cold view in his own poetics, it is as the Bat-Poet answered the mockingbird. Jarrell’s poems try hard, and find a style that tries hard, for sympathy, for the perspective not of the universe but of the tiny people who live in it, all of whom have to matter if any do.

Each of us was—as Rilke says in “The Grown-Up” (a poem Jarrell translated)—“a child once”; all of us are as leaves before death, as laundry in wind, if any of us are (CP 239). Examined and appreciated far less frequently than Jarrell’s poems about children, his poems about cosmically helpless selves bring some of the same terms to bear on the same moral center. Many of them are poems about visual art; with them, this book can come to an end.⁵ Comparing several centuries of European painters, Jarrell’s “The Old and the New Masters” (as several readers have seen) functions as a sort of manifesto.⁶ Where Auden’s “Musée de Beaux Arts” declared, “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters,” Jarrell explains that the masters “disagree” (237; CP 332). Describing real and imaginary nativities, Jarrell recommends an Old Master like van der Goes, for whom “everything / That was or will be in the world is fixed / On its small, helpless, human center.” By contrast, the New Masters’ undesirable cosmic perspectives treat the earth as one planet among many; they might even be indifferent to our demise (CP 333).⁷

More complex, more troubling ekphrastic poems share Jarrell’s preference for a “human center” but explore doubts about its realization. Though (like anything else) it may be symbolized, the self, Jarrell’s poems sometimes suggest, cannot be adequately, permanently, unquestionably depicted in visual media, since the self (unlike a painting or a sculpture) exists in time and has no final, unchanging form. Yet the same criteria suggest how hard it is for verbal art to represent the self: poems, too, however they may resist closure (or trope an ongoing conversation) are fixed sets of words with beginnings and ends of their own—the same words, no matter who reads them. Problems of how to get the ungraspable, intangible, self and its “value” into a work of art—of what techniques might do so, and of why we want so much to see it done—were problems Jarrell took up very early. He addressed them most fully, and most selfconsciously, in the ekphrastic poetry of his final years.

By far his most famous poem about art is “The Bronze David of Donatello” (1958). Donatello’s bronze David (1425–30?) depicts a slim and confident adolescent—nude, helmeted, and holding a sword—standing on Goliath’s severed head. It is well known as the first freestanding, life-size sculptural nude since Roman times, and as an early example of Renaissance realism.⁸ Jarrell’s ambitious 1953 review of André Malraux’s The Voices of Silence and his 1957 attack on Action Painting both recommend a return to such realism and to “the represented world” (KA 285–286). Given Jarrell’s sophistication about art history, his anxiety about late-modernist autotelism, and his interest in defending the self, we might expect him to see in Donatello’s David (as he saw in van der Goes’s Nativity) an embodiment of the values he recommends. And yet Jarrell’s notion of selfhood can never be David’s: it is, the poem discovers, more like Goliath’s, never self-sufficient, and more fully realized in defeat. Rather than admiring its sculptural realism, “The Bronze David of Donatello” turns David’s triumphant self-presence into an anxious, anguished commentary about age and youth, about eros and gender, and about the distance that separates persons from their representations in art.⁹

“A sword in his right hand, a stone in his left hand,” David stands “Shod and naked. Hatted and naked” (CP 273). His shamelessness, his elegance, and his youth combine to make him sexually appealing and to make that appeal disturbing:

Before it can answer such questions, the poem returns to David’s anomalous status as an innocent victor, who “handles” swords, but is himself “unhandled.” Untouched by the world and victorious within it, he is neither a vulnerable child nor a regretful, self-conscious adult—nor is he like the adolescent girl of “The Night Before” who was both vulnerable and self-conscious. David is instead almost her opposite, being everything about adolescence that does not represent the poet in Jarrell’s poems. Donatello’s David thus represents (even if Donatello the sculptor does not) a theory of art directly counter to Jarrell’s aims. David’s

The poem has begun at David’s head and moved down; it is about to reach Goliath’s severed head. A simpler poem might see the giant as a defeated hero. Instead this Goliath is almost comic: “The head dreams what has destroyed it / And is untouched by its destruction.”

Goliath dreams almost as the child readers in Jarrell’s library poems dream—he shows no compassion nor does he incarnate some more hopeful idea about art. Nevertheless, his defeated head invites sympathy. David, above Goliath and above the viewer, “looks down at the head and does not see it,” just as he did not see us: “alone, now, in his triumph,” he notices no one (neither men nor women). One of the things that makes him oddly, dangerously, sexually attractive is his apparent freedom from sexual needs: Jarrell’s notes for the poem call David’s “genitals sexless as a child’s … since sex [is] that in which we lose ourselves / die” (UNC-Greensboro). The young David appears to exist prior to and above all the childish or grown-up desires that lead us to require satisfactions from one another rather than in ourselves:

Like an abstract expressionist painter declaring independence from nature, David encapsulates all the victories art can win when it separates itself from an interpersonal matrix; its triumphant closures and completions make such a confident art false to our lives. In David, one draft has it, “No part / Breaks from its bounds, no part acknowledges /The unanswerable: the world of which it once was part[,] the useless and means-less end” (UNC-Greensboro). Having no concept of ends beyond himself, David leaves no room for the relations for which Jarrell’s characters yearn—he is indeed a freestanding statue.

He is, even, a statue that seems to dance. “The dance,” writes Suzanne Ferguson, “is a projection of David’s inward triumph, his total indifference to his victim. He exists only in himself” (Poetry 184). The frightening David thus makes at once a bad moral example and a bad model for art, exactly because he is such a good model for artists’ aspirations. This secularized, careless David becomes what Frank Kermode (discussing the dancers in modernist poems) has termed “a Herodiade emblem, representing at once the cruelty of the isolation [of modern art] and the beauty (distinct from life yet vital) of its product” (70). Modernist works in which art wants to be like a dance, however admirable, complete the work Donatello’s David begins: they falsify the persons whom Jarrell seeks to draw out—persons visible through false starts, wrong moves, defeats, incompletions, awkward phraseology, all the aspects of life in a shared human world that are not and cannot be like dance and that resist certainty and closure.

Invented out of Wordsworthian Romanticism, Jarrell’s poetics thus end by rejecting what Kermode names the Romantic image. What does Jarrell—what can art—offer in its stead? We saw in chapter 1 how the interruptions and awkwardly complex sentences of other poems mimed the incompleteness of real persons.¹⁰ “The psychological correlate of [aesthetic] closure,” Charles Altieri writes, “is the dream of a coherent and satisfying representation of the self, either as an individual or as someone in full possession of the terms by which he or she identifies with other people” (Self 148). Since, for Jarrell, selves are vulnerable, interdependent, and by definition alterable, such psychological closure can never be found. To the extent that works of art have closure—and no work can avoid it entirely—all works of art falsify the self. “The Bronze David” suggests that the human person cannot be accurately and compassionately represented in any freestanding sculpture, or in any sculpture of a triumph, except perhaps by figures of defeat.

The later poem “Man in Majesty” goes even further: it suggests that a human being cannot be fully represented in art at all, because what makes us human—our embeddedness in discourse, our ability to change, our intersubjective awareness—cannot be captured by any thing we can make. Jarrell’s Pygmalionesque sculptor finds himself taken in by a work of art, almost as if he had been seduced by David. That sculptor “looks into the swan’s-down of a statue,” whose “alabaster, / Lit with his look’s light, flames to him in pure / Seduction” (CP 488). That statue makes its self-sufficiency a source of pride, and then of frustration, since it cannot be human:

Learning that art works can never be fully human, Jarrell’s failed Pygmalion learns instead to make art that is its own, abstract, unchanging end. This newer art, triumphantly autotelic (like David, like modernist poems for Kermode, or like modernist painting for Clement Greenberg), no longer asks of us more feeling than we can give, no longer yearns for what it cannot have, no longer entangles its spectators in dangerous, demanding emotions. On the other hand, it cannot be loved:

Viewers’ “hearts go out to” the sculptures of “In Galleries”; this sculptor’s “hand” goes out instead (CP 298; italics mine). Like the “New Masters” (and like Faust, to whom the last lines allude) this sculptor has made a disturbing bargain. Confronted with the ineluctable difference between representing a person in art and acknowledging persons outside art, he has given up even trying to represent people.

Instead he makes things. “Homo faber, the … producer of things,” Arendt writes, “can find his proper relationship to other people only by exchanging his products with theirs, because these products themselves are always produced in isolation” (Human 161–162). No wonder this artist is lonely; but was he less so when he made human forms? Like Content in “The End of the Rainbow,” this sculptor raises the possibility that a life spent on works of art is not well spent—is, even, a life unlived, precisely because we cannot have from works of art the recognition we seek from human beings. “Without my paintings,” Content asks, “I would be—/ Why, whatever would I be?” (CP 228) “Old enough to be invisible,” Content has “spent her principal on dreams”; Jarrell’s long poem about her asks, among other questions, whether the good of dreams, or of works of art, might be the only good we have: “How can a dream be bad / If it keeps one asleep?” (CP 228). Perhaps dreams, illusions, representations of other lives and other speakers are all we can find to alleviate our isolation—just as they were all that Goliath had left.

I have spent most of this book showing how Jarrell depicted interpersonal, interdependent, imagining selves, who speak and listen and play. Theories of such selves are now in demand, in some of the social sciences as well as in literary and cultural thought. Jarrell’s poems manifest such selves; those manifestations show us what he accomplished. But poems such as “The Bronze David” and “The End of the Rainbow” also allow for a bleaker view: perhaps our senses of ourselves are not only interdependent but unsustainable. Perhaps, no matter how hard we look, we cannot find lasting recognition at all: we are so made as to seek what we cannot have, and art is our way of pretending to have it.

Can the self be manifest in art? To whom, and how? Is it something we understand only when we see it as hidden, or as under threat, or as “nothing,” or as “lost”? Though any given work of art has an end, the project of manifesting the self in art is potentially endless. That project may be seen as a collaboration between an artist’s past and her present, as well as a collaboration between past creators and present ones. The self might even be defined by, and as, our continuing, continually frustrated project of representing it to others. Such a project would proceed—over a career or over centuries—partly and paradoxically through a series of complaints that it is impossible. What may (on the basis of its forms and themes) be Jarrell’s last poem about art makes just such a guardedly optimistic claim. Excluded from The Complete Poems, and rediscovered in 2000, the untitled poem appears here, for the first time:

Looking into the prehistory of art, the poem also looks back over Jarrell’s career: the lost “shard” recalls the “broken” knife in “Thinking of the Lost World” (and the broken cup in Frost’s “Directive”). And the biblical language, traced to its source (Ecclesiastes 3:21), becomes a question about the life course, survival, and mortality: the surrounding passage reads (in the Authorized Version)

The poem’s core questions are originally religious, or metaphysical: do we have souls that survive our bodily deaths, or are we only “animals” despite our abilities? But (as in “Jerome” and “The Night Before”) Jarrell gradually replaces these questions with psychological and aesthetic ones. The “souls” that matter, the psyches we develop (and that make us “unnatural”) are displayed in art, because they are displayed in our impulse to make works of art. “Showing all the world,” our representations of visible, audible, tangible things become the best evidence we have for that invisible, intangible thing, the self or psyche or soul, which (as Arendt had it) can “add constantly new things to the already existing world” only because it is not identical with that world (Between 217).

The self toward which Jarrell’s rhetorical questions and broken-off sentences gesture becomes visible as the maker of utterances, the fabricator of things in the world, precisely because the self cannot be represented directly within them. The process by which art reveals the self is “unarguable” because it cannot be proven to take place. Our apprehension of other people’s inner lives—in everyday life, just as in works of art—depends upon their own appeal to our interiority; explicit arguments (rather than demonstrations) that we have inner lives, or that art reveals them, are lost as soon as they need to be made. Moreover, all selves are “lost” in a different sense: we all die, and the works of art we make, though they may outlast us, can break, or corrode, or become unintelligible, or perish along with their civilizations. (An earlier poem, about the “Lost Colony” of Jamestown, declared, “All colonies are lost” [CP 286].) Arendt describes in The Human Condition the “reification and materialization without which no thought can become a tangible thing,” but that impart to all art a material “deadness from which it can be rescued only when the dead letter comes again into contact with a life willing to resurrect it”; at the same time “this resurrection of the dead shares with all living things [the fact] that it, too, will die again” (169). That process, with its glory and its pathos, is what Jarrell’s late poem about early paintings describes.

Arendt also believed that genuine art required at least the fiction of permanence: “only when we are confronted with things,” she wrote, “whose quality remains always the same, do we speak of works of art” (Between 210). Jarrell’s succession of key words argues otherwise. Repeating and repositioning “natural,” “lost” (and its homonym “loess”), “show,” “man” along with the negative prefixes un- and not, Jarrell’s succession of interrupted sentences and rhetorical questions suggests that we apprehend art—and recognize one another—partly because it and we can never be permanent. The underground Ark with all its imagined animals, the artist in the cave with his cave paintings, the poet with his posthumous Complete Poems, exist in time and will finally be lost. At the same time they appeal for new life to those who encounter them. To see the painted animals (deer, or eland), to find the “shard” or hear the discovered poem, is like recognizing persons from the past—or like being recognized by them. The lonely makers of “lost” works have been waiting (in libraries, in caves) for us, just as we and the works of our age may await other listeners, viewers, readers: all the more reason for us to pay attention to them while we can.