28
" One day is one wave, and the next day the next, for the sea people―and whether they're glad or whether they're sorry, the sea washes it away. When my sister died, the next day I'd forgotten and was happy. But if you died, if he died, my heart would break.
When it storms for the people, no matter how terribly it storms, the storm isn't real―swim down a few strokes and it's calm there, down there it's always calm. And death is not different, if it's someone else who dies. We say. 'Swim away from it'; we swim away from everything.
But on land it's different. The storm's real here, and the red leaves, and the branches when they're bare all winter. It all changes and never stops changing, and I'm here with nowhere to swim to, no way ever to leave it or forget it. No, the land's better! The land's better! "
― Randall Jarrell , The Animal Family
29
" In spring the meadow that ran down from the cliff to the beach was all foam-white and sea-blue with flowers; the hunter looked at it and it was beautiful. But when he came home there was no one to tell what he had seen―and if he picked the flowers and brought them home in his hands, there was no one to give them to. And when at evening, past the dark blue shape of a far-off island, the sun sank under the edge of the sea like a red world vanishing, the hunter saw it all, but there was no one to tell what he had seen.
One winter night, as he looked at the stars that, blazing coldly, made the belt and the sword of the hunter Orion, a great green meteor went slowly across the sky. The hunter's heart leaped, he cried: "Look, look!" But there was no one to look. "
― Randall Jarrell , The Animal Family
31
" Before the bat could answer, the mockingbird exclaimed angrily: "You sound as if there were something wrong with imitating things!"
"Oh no," the bat said.
"Well then, you sound as if there something wrong with driving them off. It's my territory, isn't it? If you can't drive things off your own territory what can you do?"
The bat didn't know what to say; after a minute the chipmunk said uneasily, "He just meant it's odd to drive them all off and then imitate them so well too."
"Odd!" cried the mockingbird. "Odd! If I didn't it really would be odd. Did you ever hear of a mockingbird that didn't?"
The bat said politely, "No indeed. No, it's just what mockingbirds do do. That's really why I made up the poem about it--I admire mockingbirds so much, you know."
The chipmunk said, "He talks about them all the time."
"A mockingbird's sensitive," said the mockingbird; when he said sensitive his voice went way up and way back down. "They get on my nerves. You just don't understand how much they get on my nerves. Sometimes I think if I can't get rid of them I'll go crazy."
"If they didn't get on your nerves so, maybe you wouldn't be able to imitate them so well, the chipmunk said in a helpful, hopeful voice. "
― Randall Jarrell , The Bat-Poet
33
" The Face
Die alte Frau, die alte Marshchallin!
Not good anymore, not beautiful—
Not even young.
This isn’t mine.
Where is the old one, the old ones?
Those were mine.
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.
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.
I know, there’s no saying no.
But just the same you say it. No.
I’ll point to myself and say: I’m not like this.
I’m the same as always inside.
—And even that’s not so.
I thought: if nothing happens…
and nothing happened.
Here I am.
But it’s not right.
If just living can do this,
Living is more dangerous than anything:
It is terrible to be alive. "
― Randall Jarrell , The Complete Poems
36
" The Elementary Scene"
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 girls' 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.
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. "
― Randall Jarrell
39
" This earth carries aboard it many ordinary passengers; and it carries, also, a few very important ones. It is hard to know which people are, or were, or will be which. Great men may come to the door in carpet-slippers, their faces like those of kindly or fretful old dogs, and not even know that they are better than you; a friend meets you after fifteen years and the Nobel Prize, and he is sadder and fatter and all the flesh in his face has slumped an inch nearer the grave, but otherwise he is as of old. They are not very important people.
On the other hand, the president of your bank, the Vice-Chancellor of the—no, not of the Reich, but of the School of Agriculture of the University of Wyoming: these, and many Princes and Powers and Dominions, are very important people; the quality of their voices has changed, and they speak more distinctly from the mounds upon which they stand, making sure that their voices come down to you.
The very important are different from us. Yes, they have more everything. They are spirits whom that medium, the world, has summoned up just as she has the rest of us, but there is in them more soul-stuff, more ego—the spirit of Gog or Magog has been summoned. There is too much ectoplasm: it covers the table, moves on toward the laps of the rest of us, already here, sitting around the table on straight chairs, holding one another's hands in uneasy trust. We push back our chairs, our kinship breaks up like a dream: it is as if there were no longer Mankind, but only men. "
― Randall Jarrell , Pictures from an Institution