RANDALL JARRELL AND SECULAR AMERICAN DEATH
When George Herbert, in The Collar, cries out "Call in thy death's head here: tie up thy fears," he is trying to outface the traditional memento mori symbol that squelches his worldly, Renaissance instinct to rebel, with the unwelcome message, "prepare your soul to meet your maker." However, over a millenium earlier that same death's head said something quite different to Horace. When the skull was inscribed on Roman drinking cups, it said carpe diem, seize (or pluck or harvest) the day, "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die," or as Horace himself finished the thought, "don't trust in tomorrow." (Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. Odes 1, 11, line 8) This transformation in meaning, from care for this world to care for the afterlife, was brought about by patristic writers in the early Christian centuries, who made it central to the pursuit of salvation.
The carpe diem message is very alien to Randall Jarrell's temperament because his sexual reticence largely excludes adolescent and adult lust. In general, we think of Jarrell as a poet of childhood, World War II, and more fundamentally, a poet searching for the meaning of death and loss, loss of childhood, beauty, people, and the security and permanence of Classical Order. And he is very much a man of his time: liberal, secular, American. In his handling of themes connected to death, however, we see the ghosts of early figures for encountering death.
It is worth looking at memento mori and a variety of related Classical and Christian death tropes to provide a context in which to consider Jarrell's handling of death and loss in his poems--to see more clearly what he does, and more significantly, what he chooses not to do, with traditions that he was deeply aware of.
The theme that gets its famous line from the Catholic Office of the Dead, timor mortis conturbat me, fear of death disturbs me, is allied to the memento mori because it too is a call for repentance: "Since I have been sinning every day without repenting..." However, its use in English poetry is divided. In Donne's "Holy Sonnets," for example, it appears in its orthodox form as fear of damnation and hope for repentance and grace, but in the previous century, in Dunbar's "Lament for the Makers," which uses the Latin phrase timor mortis conturbat me as a refrain, the tone is dominantly elegiac, and celebrates the world it loses, hardly bothering to prepare the soul or to repent. Dunbar, in a fatalistic mood, laments the loss of health and security in a fragile world:
I that in heill was and gladness,
am troublit now with great seikness,
and feeblit with infirmity:
Timor Mortis counturbat me.
...
The state of man dois change and vary,
Now sound, now seik, now blyth, now sary,
Now dansand merry, now like to die;
Timor Mortis conturbat me.
Then the poem shifts to the form that in the middle ages and early Renaissance was known as the Dance of Death: that regardless of age, courage, beauty, degree or profession, death will come to take all--knights, magicians, astrologers, rhetoricians, logicians, leeches, surgeons, physicians, and so forth. The last half of Dunbar's poem, from which it gets its name, is a list of the 'makeris'--the poets--of England and Scotland who have died: the list runs from Chaucer, Gower, Henryson and Lydgate to Blind Harry and Sandy Traill (a Robert Lowell family name!) and its tone is not moralistic but is both celebration and lament for the great dead. The name for this turn in the theme is ubi sunt, "where are those that lived before us." (ubi sunt qui ante nos in mundo fuere?) The medieval English poems, "Ubi Sunt qui Ante Nos Fuerunt?" begins with what seems like a celebration of riches, beuaty and luxury, but makes clear quickly that they are the road to damnation. "And in the twincling of an eye/ Hoere soules weren forloren." The virtuous, those in hope of salvation, must turn their backs on riches and pleasure.
When the list of the departed consists of women, and particular, great beauties, ubi sunt turns into another trope called "Death and the Maiden,"[1] as in Villon's famous ballade in The Testament dedicated to dead ladies, noble and not, with the famous refrain, Mais où sont les neiges d'antan? (where are the snows of last year?) The two directions of this trope are, again, moralistic and elegiac: on the first hand, beware you proud beauties, prepare your souls, for you too will die. Villon chooses the elegaic: where are the great beauties who delighted us?
The last trope I want to consider is a relative newcomer to the list, and it was recovered as a death trope for our time by Erwin Panofsky in a very famous essay, "Et in arcadia ego." It was first published in a collection of essays for Ernst Cassirer's 60th birthday in 1936, and then was collected a few years later in a volume of Panofsky's essays, and from there it appeared in a variety of anthologies of art and literary criticism. While there is no mention of Panofsky or the essay in Jarrell's Collected Letters, I believe it is highly likely that he knew the essay, given its fame, its wide distribution, his interest in the visual arts and in German intellectual culture. Moreover, in "An English Garden in Austria," the following lines are clearly based on the Panofsky essay since they are connected with Goethe and the speaker is identified as Death.
"We also have dwelt in Arcady."
--So Death.[2]
These lines, which might be, otherwise, utterly elliptical, gather their weight from Panofsky's demonstration of Goethe's view of the Romantic use of the phrase, and here he is answered by the pre-Romantic speaker of the line, Death.
Panofsky's argument is that the phrase must be rescued from the misreading that has prevailed since the 18th Century, as the elegiac voice of one who lives in Arcadia no longer, and who speaks to the Arcadians with nostalgia for his former, perfect home and community of like minded souls. Panofsky traces the idea of Arcadia from the rocky, savage place, the home of Pan, as it appears in Greek literature to its transformation by Virgil into an image of the perfect pastoral world. In the Fifth Eclogue Virgil laments the death of Daphnis, around his tomb, and this, Panofsky considers the tomb the "almost indispensable feature of Arcady in later poetry and art." [3] Virgil's frankly utopian vision presents Arcadia as the object of nostalgic longing for a lost world that stands in bitter opposition to the imperfections of the present. In the Renaissance, in Tasso's hands, idyllic Arcadia becomes the cudgel with which to beat the repressive Counter-Reformation that has lost touch with nature and the beautiful nude body. The poet-Pope, Clement IX, is supposed to have suggested the phrase et in arcadia ego to his friend, the painter Guercino, suggested and probably invented it when he commissioned a painting, because the phrase doesn't exist in Classical literature. In Guercino's painting it appears on a scroll issuing from a death's head on a tomb in Arcadia and is spoken to two shepherds.
An excellent Latinist, Panofsky points out that et must modify the noun that follows it, Arcadia, and can not modify ego and that the absent verb could not be in the past tense in this minor utterance (I am, not I was) which leaves ego as the subject and et as an intensifier with the force of even or also. And since the speaker is a death's head in the Guercino painting, the statement should be translated as "I (death) am even in Arcadia." It becomes a very special variety of memento mori by evoking the pastoral utopia, the perfect world, in which to place this warning. It chastises another dimension of human pride, the social imagination, which must be humbled by mortality. Like many of the tropes we have looked at, this one can move in the same two directions--moralistic or elegiac, and it can add another direction as well, that of social satire. Tasso's nostalgia for Arcadia had a satiric dimension.
Poussin's first painting of Et in Arcadia Ego is drawn directly from Guercino, who left Rome shortly before Poussin arrived. In this painting the inscription has moved from the mouth of the skull to the tomb, and the evident shock on the faces of the two shepherds, joined here by a shepherdess, makes it clear that the painting is still in the admonitory tradition. The much more familiar second painting, in the Louvre, changes this focus dramatically. In this picture the death's head is gone and the shepherds are pensive. Panofsky calls this a "radical break with the Medieval moralizing tradition" and "The arcadians are not so much warned of an implacable future as they are immersed in mellow meditation on a beautiful past...no longer a dramatic encounter with death but a contemplative absorption in the idea of mortality...an undisguised elegiac sentiment." Poussin is credited by Panofsky with this transformation of the phrase, passed on to the Romantics and the moderns: that it now expresses the loss of a beautiful past of fellowship in Arcadia.
These tropes enter in two of the poems dealing with death that Jarrell published in the early sixties, "Next Day" and "In Montecito," and undergo complex variations in the hands of a secular and skeptical poet. In the first, the title of the poem locates the woman on the next day after the funeral of a friend.
And yet I'm afraid, as I was at the funeral
I went to yesterday.
My friend's cold, made-up face, granite among its flowers,
Her undressed, operated on, dressed body
Were my face and body.[4]
But this is not where the poem begins--these lines are near the end--and prepare us for the form that the timor mortis trope assumes in an entirely secular world. The poem begins with a 50's stereotyped middle-aged suburban shopper, with her mind on husband, children, lost youth and beauty, interpolated by flashes of learning and wit. ("Wisdom, said William James,//Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise/ If that is wisdom.") In what Jarrell calls the "womanish" ordinariness of her world--illuminated by her ironic intelligence--she fears the change that is coming over her in age, as she confronts the true meaning of ordinariness, in something like the form of the first order of syllogisms: All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. Her ordinariness, like that of Socrates, seems to her identical with her mortality, and the concluding lines flood her with this recognition:
But really no one is exceptional,
No one has anything, I'm anybody,
I stand beside my grave
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.
This is timor mortis without repentance for sins. Instead of the terror of damnation, she is confused by her ordinary mortality. The impulse of the poem does not deflate her life. The very ordinariness of her consumer world ("as I buy All from these shelves") with its brand name emotional and metaphysical jokes (the famous first line, "Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All") and her vanity about her lost beauty (again, with a consumer metaphor: "I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me/ And its mouth watered.") make her apparently truly ordinary. And yet she leaps beyond this in an act of sexual imagination[5] to an inclusive humanity:
and holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile
Imaginings within my imagining,
I too have taken
The chance of life.
Jarrell has presented us, as Everyman, not the Christian in pursuit of his salvation, but a suburban matron possessing a blessed uncommon wisdom that can recognize, and struggle to accept, her common mortality. In struggling to overlook she cannot help but recognize. He has Americanized and suburbanized the Office of the Dead. Like the Christian allegorization of the Classical pantheon in the Renaissance, what we see in Jarrell is the secularization of the Christian account of the meaning of death: it leaves the fear and horror intact but alters the meaning by removing the afterlife. The pain and the cost are endured in this life.
The way these tropes are used in "In Montecito" is strikingly different. In this poem we have a satiric use of et in arcadia ego framed by a grotesque sense of the horror of death that is associated with the trope called "Death and the Maiden." Here the speaker does not confront his own death, and his recognition of his own mortality is outside the poem, evident only in the horror image itself. Let us begin with Arcadia. In the 60's Montecito had the reputation of being the wealthiest town in America, and possibly in the world. On the Academy of American Poets tape of Jarrell's reading at the Guggenheim Museum, he describes Montecito as "full of elevated, cultivated, gentle Goldwater supporters." It is a place where "the sweet air/ That was always the right temperature," suggests a world entirely too perfect. The cricket matches, the Bentley, the Anglo in the Crocker-Anglo Bank suggest that in the embrace of English cachet in the hills above Santa Barbara we see an artificial paradise, like Arcadia. He describes the name Taliaferro, on the same tape, as an "aristocratic spelling and a homely pronunciation" (Tolliver) of a common Southern name. Greenie's "old salt and pepper hair stripped by the hairdresser/ To nothing and dyed platinum" suggests that the natural world follows the same pattern as the cultural world in arcadian Montecito. And yet, what are we to make of Greenie? I do not think we are to dismiss her as an artificial tootsie any more than we would dismiss the speaker in "Next Day" as inconsequential. There would be no horror at her death if she were an empty vessel, though the details of what we know about her are sparing: "In her white maillot, her good figure almost firm...They have thrown away her electric tooth brush, someone else slips/ The key into the lock of her safety-deposit box...her seat at the cricket matches/ Is warmed by buttocks less delectable than hers./ Greenie's girdle is empty." The word "delectable" keeps this from slipping completely into simple satire of upper class pretensions and keeps her humanness in place among the funny and grotesque details that are used to characterize her.
This vision of Greenie in the pastoral Arcadia, is framed by one of Jarrell's characteristic nightmare visions. Throughout his career he was committed to encountering the meaning of the latent language of the unconscious in dream, myth, folk-tale, and even in the political life ("From my mother's sleep I fell into the State"). Here he envisions death as fully artificial as the world of Montecito demands.
the contractors
Who had undertaken to dismantle it, stripped off
The lips, let the air out of the breasts.
People disappear
Even in Montecito.
Death is presented as if it were the end of the Macy's Thanksgiving parade--but the nightmare is of "Death and the Maiden" with the image like that of Hans Baldung Gruen's--death with his hand on the voluptuous breast of the maiden. And this is the special sense of horror in this trope--that the maiden is delectable and the image celebrates her vitality as the means of conveying the horror of her death. It is a "scream with breasts." Death, which appears euphemistically as "disappearance," "Even in Montecito" enables us to hear the rhetorical force of the et that Panofsky described. (My Latin Dictionary lists also, even, and indeed for et.)
The conclusion of the poem returns us to the parade contractors dismantling the enormous inflated figure, and to the scream that disappears into the greater Montecito, deflating as well the language of urban inflation into an echoing city of the dead.
A scream hangs there in the night:
They strip off the lips, let the air out of the breasts.
And Greenie has gone into the Greater Montecito
That surrounds Montecito like the echo of a scream.
Both Panofsky's recovery of the lost meaning of death in Arcadia and the horror that pervades the trope, Death and the Maiden, are interwoven in the imagining of this intense, concentrated poem. As in "Next Day," we have a poet taking over the Medieval and Renaissance tropes for contemporary purposes, refusing entirely to accept the meanings which are deeply interwoven in their own Christian culture. He has brought them into a secular America in the 20th Century to counter its historical arcadianism. Interestingly enough he ignores the Roman trope, carpe diem, which is entirely this-worldly and with which one might think he would have a greater affinity.
Professor Barry Goldensohn
Department of English
Skidmore College
Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
February 8, 2002