Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

"Mail Call" by Randall Jarrell is a haunting evocation of the emotional landscape of soldiers, painting a vivid picture of the yearning, loss, and ephemeral hope that letters from home can bring. Through the lens of soldiers awaiting mail, Jarrell delves into broader themes of existence, time, and identity, all wrapped in the seemingly simple act of waiting for one's name to be called out during mail distribution.

The poem begins with an image of letters just evading the grasp, "skating like a stone into a beam, falling like a bird." This embodies the frustration and disappointment of soldiers who do not receive news from home. The letters, like memories and lost times, are beyond capture; they escape into beams or fall like birds, existing in a different realm that the soldiers can't quite touch.

The line, "Surely the past from which the letters rise / Is waiting in the future, past the graves?" introduces an existential query. Letters are not just pieces of paper; they are time capsules, pieces of a past that these soldiers have been severed from. Jarrell suggests a paradoxical relation between past and future. The past, usually considered unchangeable and inert, becomes an active force that might be "waiting in the future," implying that even as the soldiers face mortal danger, they also face the constant haunting of their past lives, which they hope to reclaim.

"The soldiers are all haunted by their lives" delivers a poignant insight into the psychological state of these men. It's not just the specter of death that haunts them; it's their own lives, the mundanity, the loved ones, and the missed opportunities. They are haunted by the absence of normality, illustrated by the phrase, "Their claims upon their kind are paid in paper / That established a presence, like a smell." Letters are all they have to connect them to their former selves and loved ones; the soldiers live "in letters and in dreams."

Then, the poem turns to the concept of waiting, a significant part of a soldier's life. "They are waiting: and the years contract / To an empty hand, to one unuttered sound." Waiting becomes an act of emotional compression, where years of lives are condensed into moments of profound yearning for something as simple as a letter, or even simpler, for one's name to be called. The poem ends on this somber note, "The soldier simply wishes for his name," which encapsulates the profound loneliness and alienation soldiers feel. This is a desire for identity, for acknowledgment of their existence, which has been wiped away by the machinery of war.

Jarrell's "Mail Call" serves as a powerful tribute to the interior lives of soldiers, shedding light on the psychological and emotional toll that war inflicts. It explores the complexities of human need, the desire for connection, and the weight of time and identity, all within the context of an event as commonplace as a mail call, thereby elevating the mundane to the monumental.

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