Written by
“Losses” by Randall Jarrell
It was not dying: everybody died.
It was not dying: we had died before
In the routine crashes— and our fields
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,
And the rates rose, all because of us.
We died on the wrong page f the almanac,
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend,
We blazed up on the lines we never saw.
We died like aunts or pets or foreigners.
(When we left high school nothing else had died
For us to figure we had died like.)
In our new planes, with our new crews, we bombed
The ranges by the desert or the shore,
Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores—
And turned into replacements and worked up
One morning, over England, operational.
It wasn't different: but if we died
It was not an accident but a mistake
(But an easy one for anyone to make.)
We read our mail and counted up our missions—
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school—
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, "Our casualties were low."
They said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities.
It was not dying —no, not ever dying;
But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead,
And the cities said to me: "Why are you dying?
We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?"
The poem “Losses” by Randall Jarrell conveys how the atrocities that occur during war are normalized to the extent that horrors such as death, destruction, and psychological damage are seen as common. The soldiers who fight in war struggle with internal conflicts of identity, innocence, and honor as they are faced with the brutalities of war. In the first stanza, when Jarrell insists that “It was not dying”, he claims that death itself is not the issue, as all humans are subject to their inevitable demise (Jarrell 1). Instead, it is the manner of the death that defines the honor and glory associated with its occurrence. The men who die, not on the battlefield, but in fatal accidents before engaging in battle, die on the “wrong page of the almanac”, which is to say the loss of their lives is not even dignified with a mark in a notebook; their deaths cannot respectively contribute to the number of casualties in battle (Jarrell 6). The pain of the pilots who crash miles from the battlefield and the soldiers who have to fight alongside their friends emphasizes how war robs these young men of their innocence. Their young, inexperienced minds compare each other’s tragic deaths to deaths they are familiar with: the disheartening death of a pet, the respected but insignificant death of a foreigner, and the devastating death of an aunt. In the second stanza, The young men work together as a singular machine with no sympathy for the enemy. They “[bomb] the ranges” and “[fire] at towed targets”, expressing no guilt for the atrocities they commit in the name of war (Jarrell 13 - 15). In the third stanza, the unforgiving nature of war deems every death in on the battlefield a “mistake” rather than an “accident”, which is “easy to make” because every soldier is human, and humans are imperfect (Jarrell 19 - 20). The soldiers complete mission after mission, bombing and burning cities they “learned about in school” (Jarrell 23). They fight and die among strangers, persisting in a battle in which they feel no passion for its cause. Committing such atrocities subject these soldiers to psychological damage and strip them of the innocence they had prior to the war. In battle, an individual life is insignificant; those who survive the war are rewarded with pieces of metal, while those who die are clumped in with the “‘low’” casualties (Jarrell 27). The soldiers simply follow orders; burning the cities is not an act of passion on their part, nor is it personal. The lack of individuality is highlighted in the collective actions of the soldiers as they carry out their orders as a single entity. In the final stanza, a soldier questions the significance of his death as he dies on the battlefield. The burning cities seem to ask him, “‘Why are you dying?’”, as the soldier himself is unsure as to why he sacrificed his life and destroyed the lives of others for a war that he does not care for (Jarrell 31).
It was not dying —no, not ever dying;
But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead,
And the cities said to me: "Why are you dying?
We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?"
The last stanza of the free verse poem is a quatrain, as it consists of four lines. Jarrell utilizes the poetic device of repetition when he repeats the phrase “It was not dying” from the first line of the poem (Jarrell 29). When this phrase first appears, Jarrell stresses the fact that death itself is not as demanding as the manner by which one dies. In repeating this phrase, Jarrell questions the significance of death rather than its manner. When the narrator reveals that “...the night I died I dreamed that I was dead”, he means to say that the night he loses everything fighting in the war, he dreams that the war has robbed him of his life (Jarrell 30). This line is written in iambic pentameter, a sonic device. One unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable five times; the “the” is unstressed, followed by the stressed “night”, then the unstressed “I”, the stressed “died”, the unstressed “I”, the stressed “dreamed”, the unstressed “that”, the stressed “I”, the unstressed “was”, and the stressed “dead” (Jarrell 30). Iambic pentameter mimics the rhythm of the human heartbeat to emphasize the significance of the line, contribute to the flow of the poem, and further the transition of thought. Lines twenty-nine and thirty of the poem utilize alliteration, a sonic device, with the initial consonant sound of the letter d. The alliteration adds emphasis to keywords such as “dying”, “died”, “dreamed”, and “dead” that convey the message of the stanza about death in war (Jarrell 29 - 30). The poetic device of personification is exhibited when the cities that the soldiers burned seemingly ask the soldier for the purpose of his death and their suffering. The personification of the burning buildings highlights how the city is a victim to the actions of the soldiers. When the cities ask the soldier for his reasons, the soldier is unable to find justification in his actions. In reality, realizing the utter destruction of the city and the loss of his own life, the soldier himself questions whether all of the suffering he inflicted had any real purpose.
This poem was written in 1948, based on Randall Jarrell's experiences during World War II. In 1942, Randall Jarrell joined the United States Army Air Forces as a flying cadet, later attaining the job title of a celestial navigation tower operator. Thought the Second World War started in 1939, the US did not get involved until 1941. In 1940, the United States Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, which drafted men between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five. Thus, many men who harbored anti-war sentiment or were apathetic about the war cause were forced to join the war effort. The soldiers in Jarrell's poem are young men who are unfamiliar with death and destruction, for when they “...left high school nothing else had died” for them to completely comprehend the death they witness during the war (Jarrell 11). This loss of innocence that the soldiers undergo realistically depicts how young men faced mental scarring due to the psychological horrors of the Second World War. The poem also reflects the internal struggles with honor and identity that the US soldiers of WW2 underwent; dying on the battlefield was glorified, and individuality was sacrificed for the efficiency of the war effort as a whole and its cooperation.
This poem initially attracted me because of the first two lines: “It was not dying: everybody died. It was not dying: we had died before” (Jarrell 1-2). Reading these lines with absolutely no context left me wondering about the statement Jarrell makes about death in his poem. After reading further into the poem, I found that I could relate to the emotions of the soldiers. I often invest much of my time and effort into the prospect of a career in the medical field. Becoming a medical student is a battle I am fighting for my parents rather than myself. As I pursue this path that my parents chose for me, I find myself sacrificing my freedom as an individual to decide my future for myself. Similarly, the drafted soldiers are forced to fight in the Second World War whether or not they are patriotic. The theme of the poem delivers a jarring effect, which is my favorite aspect about the poem; young men, as pure of the cruelties of war as I am, march into war and lose valuable parts of their identities, including their mental health, their individuality, their innocence, and even their lives. It is the very nature of war to trivialize its horrors, and Randall Jarrell “Losses” efficiently captures this issue through the perspective of the soldiers.
Works Cited
Pritchard, William. “William Pritchard.” About Randall Jarrell, Modern American Poetry,
www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/jarrell/about.htm.
“Losses - Randall Jarrell.” PoemHunter.com,
www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/randall-jarrell/losses/?m=0.
Sameen J. is a 14-year-old writer born and raised in Islamabad, Pakistan. She loves to write academically inclined pieces that leave the reader thinking, engaged, and wonderfully curious. You can find her on Tumblr @Cjspoon!
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