Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell - meaning Summary
A Poet Confronts Mortality
In a brief, dreamlike scene the speaker experiences a visitation by Randall Jarrell, merging waking and sleeping realities through recurring cigarette imagery. Jarrell appears diminished yet still animated, reproaching the speaker for delay and for rewriting rather than producing original work. The encounter reduces literary ambition to mortality’s questions, ending with Jarrell addressing Cal
and asking why they lived and why they die, turning personal regret into a general inquiry about purpose.
The dream went like a rake of sliced bamboo, slats of dust distracted by a downdraw; I woke and knew I held a cigarette; I looked, there was none, could have been none; I slept off years before I woke again, palming the floor, shaking the sheets. I saw nothing was burning. I awoke, I saw I was holding two lighted cigarettes. . . . They come this path, old friends, old buffs of death. Tonight it’s Randall, his spark still fire though humble, his gnawed wrist cradled like Kitten. “What kept you so long, racing the cooling grindstone of your ambition? You didn’t write, you rewrote.... But tell me, Cal, why did we live? Why do we die?”
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