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  • "The Tongue of Gods and Children":Blakean Innocence in Randall Jarrell's Poetry*
  • Bernard Horn (bio)

To prefer the nest in the lindenBy Apartment Eleven, the ShorehamArms, to Apartment ElevenWould be childish. But we are children.

"Hope" (p. 305)1

For Randall Jarrell, while we are all, like children, powerless victims of a destructive time, we are also unlike children because our imaginations have been victimized. Consequently, the freshness of perception, the naive hope, and the poignancy of childhood and childish things pervade his poetry. Only in William Blake's Songs of Innocence do we find so rich an exploration of these matters, but before I explore this quality of "innocence" more fully, I shall first make distinctions among the various ways childhood creeps into Jarrell's poems. First, there are "The Owl's Bedtime Story" and the Bat-Poet's poems: lyrics, narratives, and descriptive poems primarily directed at an audience of children. Next, there are poems like "The Marchen," "The Sleeping Beauty: Variation of the Prince," and "Cinderella," that contain subject matter from "children's literature" but are directed at an adult audience. Finally, there is the largest group of poems—some directed at adults, some at children, many at both—poems either about childhood or narrated by children.

(1) When the swans turned my sister into a swanI would go to the lake, at night, from milking.

"The Black Swan" (p. 54)

(2) Never again will OrionFall on my speller through the starTaped on the broken window by my cot.My knee is ridged like cornAnd the scab peels off it.

We are going to live in a new pumpkinUnder a gold star.

"Moving" (p. 94) [End Page 148]

(3) At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its floe,I clambered to bed; up the globe's impossible sidesI sailed all night—till at last, with my black beard,My furs and my dogs, I stood at the northern pole.

"90 North" (p. 113)

(4) Sometimes as I drive by the factoryThat manufactures, after so long, VicksVapoRub Ointment, there rises over meA eucalyptus tree.

"The Lost World" (p. 289)

(5) All night in the womb I heard the stories.My brother was a fish, began, "O fish!"And I listened till my gills began to fall.

"A Little Poem" (p. 362)

Piping down the valleys wild,    Piping songs of pleasant glee,On a cloud I saw a child    And he laughing said to me:

The last quotation, of course, is from Blake's "Introduction" to Songs of Innocence. Juxtaposing Blake's stanza with the fragments from Jarrell demonstrates the kinship between the two poets. No poet since Blake has brought off so well that quality of "innocence," that matter-of-fact acceptance of the supernatural, of magic and mystery, that we call "childlike." Children's tales, Jarrell writes,

    are full of sorcerers and ogresBecause their lives are: the capricious infiniteThat, like parents, no one has yet escapedExcept by luck or magic.

"Children Selecting Books in a Library" (p. 106)

Magic. No roll of a snare drum. No blare of rhetorical trumpets. But simply, "On a cloud I saw a child," or "When the swans turned my sister into a swan."

Of course Jarrell is no mere Blake imitator, though that in itself would have been quite an accomplishment; he is rather a modern partly disillusioned counterpart. Even in "The Black Swan," the poem closest to Blake, a quite un-Blakean literal dream intrudes before the swan's song restores the magical world of the child's imagination. In "Moving," my second example, Jarrell locates the girl's monologue within a third person narrative. In "90 North," the Blake-like opening turns out to be the stimulus for a bitter meditation in which an adult speaker rejects the richly meaningful "Cloud-Cuckoo-Land" of childhood in the face of existential woe "at the actual pole of my existence, / Where all that I have done is meaningless." Similarly, "A Little Poem" ends: [End Page 149]

I said, "O speak!" My brother smiled,And I saw Nothing beckon from his lids,The...

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