Analysis of Jarrell's poem "90 North"
I recently had to write this for my former English professor since apparently I need it to graduate. I thought I'd share it on my blog, since this is the kind of writing I'd love to do for a living, and publish this shit in anthologies and literary criticism books. Unfortunately I need a Ph.D. and years writing for some elitist publication like the New York Times for a publisher to consider it.
In Randall Jarrell’s poem “90 North,” a dreamlike setting harbors a child’s feelings of initial hopefulness, which quickly descend into loneliness and disappointment. It is crucial to understand who is speaking in this poem – is it a child’s voice? Is it an adult’s voice? Is it an adult speaking for the child, or finally, is it both child and adult? In the first stanza of the poem, there are indications that it is from a child’s perspective:
At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its flow,
I clambered to bed; up the globe’s impossible sides
I sailed all night – till at last, with my black beard,
My furs and my dogs, I stood at the northern pole.
Images of home, the flannel gown, and the whimsy of “clambered” remind the reader of a child cozying up to bed without a care in the world, ready to delve into the dreamworld of “impossible sides.” In the next stanza, Jarrell calls the night “childish,” implying that the speaker’s journey begins as a child, or that the journey is just beginning, therefore it is young and naïve towards the darkness yet to come.
The child sails all night, a metaphor for life’s progression, and is a black-bearded man by the third line of the poem. The speaker of the poem, who seems to have an adult voice that looks back on himself as a child, reaches his North in this dreamscape, the pinnacle of existence and achievement. He remembers reaching his North as a child, when it had meaning and excitement, but now, this idealism is lost, and the reality of “that warm world / Where people work and suffer for the end / That crowns the pain – in that Cloud-Cuckoo-Land” settles in.
The last stanza of the poem is the most troubling because of its confusing meaning brought on by the elliptical syntax:
I wrung from the darkness – that the darkness flung me –
Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,
The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom. It is pain.
The paradoxical nature of this stanza is cryptic, but ironically very telling because of its paradox. There are two ways to look at this passage. At first, the stanza may seem deeply poetic and complex – the kind of writing a tormented philosopher might conjure when trying to figure out the meaning of life. If the speaker believes “nothing comes from nothing,” then he is saying that everything humans strive for is transient and meaningless, because in the end, it will never compare to the idealistic North the child once hoped for. “Nothing comes from nothing” could also be a motivational shove, as if to say “Nothing comes from not trying, so you might as well try as hard as you can to succeed.” However, the latter interpretation would contradict the entire poem, because the speaker does indeed work hard to reach his North to achieve meaning, but all that he has done is meaningless. Therefore, both interpretations enforce the reality that nothing comes from trying, and nothing comes from not trying, so where does that leave any source of hope?
A second way of looking at the passage is to disregard its meaning altogether, instead of trying to dissect it for what it’s worth. By doing so, the reader continues the pattern of the poem’s intention. By accepting this circular kind of fate within the elliptical stanza instead of looking for meaning, the reader is not expected to reach some sort of fulfilling epiphany, as many poems do try to achieve. Even if a reader does think he or she has figured out what Jarrell means in the last stanza, what kind of meaning does this uphold? Will the reader have reached his or her North, only to find out that it still does not make sense, and that the reality is still painful? “There is nothing remarkable about the last lines except for their tone of delivery and the gap between darkness and the next line,” says Denis Donoghue in “The Lost World of Randall Jarrell” (207). Whether or not Jarrell intended for the reader to analyze the meaning of the last stanza, it is certain that the speaker believes in a world compounded by absurdity and contradiction. At the same time, he also has the determination to examine it, even if this so called “wisdom” is actually “pain” (Fowler, 103).
Jarrell’s great sense of loss, loneliness, and purposelessness is oftentimes a burden to readers. Influenced by Freudian theories of the subconscious, he traces the crucial situations in life, namely his childhood, back to when it changed and “withered into a new and darker truth,” which is done in fear (Donoghue, 207). The child’s perspective is a perfect beginning to “90 North,” and a perfect vehicle for the dream world because it is easy for the reader to recall a time when he or she happily trailed off to bed without a care in the world. The concrete images of the huddling flakes, the stiff beard stubble, and the “silence / Of the unbroken ice” are sensual and vivid, which one would expect from a child’s imagination. The imagination, however, gives way to the “darker ironies of human pretense;” the more the speaker tries to illuminate the passageway through, the more horrifying they become: “all lines, all winds / End in this whirpool I at last discover” (Fowler, 106). The child serves as a primary example of the innocent consciousness confronting the choices of honest perception (102).
