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RANDALL JARRELL
the WINTER'S TALE
The storm
rehearses through the bewildered fields
Its general logic; the contorted or dispassionate
Faces work out their incredulity, or stammer
The mistaking sentences. Night falls. In the lit
Schoolroom the hothouse guests are crammed
With their elaborate ignorance, repeat
The glib and estranged responses of the dead
To the professor's nod. The urgent galleries
Converge in anticipation on the halls
Where at announced hours the beauty,
Able, and Laughable commence patiently
The permanent recital of their aptitudes:
The song of the world. To the wicked and the furred,
The naked and the curious, the instruments proffer
Their partial and excessive knowledge; here in the suites,
Among the grains, the contraceptives and textiles,
Or inside the board cave lined with newspapers
Where in one thoroughly used room are initiated,
Persevered in, and annihilated, the forbidding ranges
Of the bewildered and extravagant responses of the cell;
Among all the exhaustible variations—of milieu,
Of compensation and excess—the waltz-theme shudders,
Frivolous, inexorable, the inadequate and conclusive
Sentence of our genius.
Along the advertisements the blisses flicker,
Partial as morphine, the terminal moraine
Of sheeted continents, a calendar of woe.
We who have
possessed the world
As efficiently as a new virus; who classified the races,
Species, and cultures of the world as scrub
To be cleared, stupidity to be liquidated, matter
To be assimilated into the system of our destruction;
Are finding how quickly the resistance of our hosts
Is built up—can think, "Tomorrow we may be remembered
As a technologist's nightmare, the megalomaniacs
Who presented to posterity as their justification
The best armies that the world ever saw."
Who made virtue and poetry and understanding
The prohibited reserves of the expert, of workers
Specialized as the ant-soldier; and who turned from their difficult
Versions to the degenerate myth, the cruelties
So incredible and habitual they seemed escapes.
Yet, through
our night, just as before,
The discharged thief stumbles, nevertheless
Weeps at its crystals, feels at the winter's
Tale the familiar and powerful delight;
The child owns the snow-man; the skier
Hesitant along the stormy crest, or wrenching
His turn from the bluff's crust, to glide
Down the stony hillside past the robbers' hut
To the house of the typhoid-carrier; the understanding
Imperturbable in their neglect, concentrating
In obscure lodgings the impatient genius
That informs all the breasts; the few who keep
By lack or obstinacy scraps of the romantic
And immediately adequate world of the past—the
Strangers with a stranger's inflections, the broken
And unlovely English of the unborn world;
All, all,
this winter night
Are weak, are emptying fast. Tomorrow puffs
From its iron centers into the moonlight, men move masked
Through streets abrupt with excavations, the explosive triumphs
Of a new architecture: the twelve-floor dumps
Of smashed stone starred with limbs, the monumental
Tombs of a whole age. A whole economy;
The fiascoes of the metaphysician, a theology's disasters,
The substitutes of the geometer for existence, the observation
Of peas and galaxies—the impatient fictions
Of the interminable and euphuist's metaphor exploding
Into use, into breath, into terror; the millennia
Of patience, of skills, of understanding, the centuries
Of terms crystallizing into weapons, the privative
And endless means, the catastrophic
Magnificence of paranoia; are elaborated into
A few bodies in the torn-up street.
The survivor poking in the ruins with a stick
Finds only portions of his friends. In this universe
Of discourse the shameless and witless facility
Of such a conclusion is normal, and no one thinks:
"What came before this was worse. Expected so long,
Arrived at last, tomorrow is death."
From the disintegrating
bomber, the mercenary
Who has sown without hatred or understanding
The shells of the absolute world that flowers
In the confused air of the dying city
Plunges for his instant of incandescence, acquiesces
In our death and his own, and welcomes
The fall of the western hegemonies.
RANDALL JARRELL (1914-1965), a
renown poet and critic, first taught at Kenyon College, alongside
his mentor and KR founder John Crowe Ransom, before going
on to an academic career that ended tragically at the University
of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. At Kenyon, Jarrell met Robert Lowell and
Peter
Taylor, with whom he
would
hold longstanding
friendships. His first book of poems, Blood for a Stranger,
was published in 1942. In 1961, he received the National Book Award
for The Woman at the Washington Zoo. Read
his acceptance speech here. Not long after he completed The
Lost World,
considered by some to be his finest book, Jarrell was hospitalized
because of a suicide attempt. While recovering at the hospital,
he went walking at dusk on a nearby highway and was struck by a
car and killed instantly. Work that appears on the KR web site is from The
Kenyon Review and all applicable copyright restrictions apply.
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