Analysis Of A Lollaby By Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell’s poem “A Lullaby” has both a glaringly bleak and starkly literal tone; it evokes despair about war and human society altogether. Set in an unclear place and time, the poem tells the story of a soldier who has sacrificed everything to fight for his country, and describes his insignificant life and death with a series of increasingly abstract similes. The speaker’s dismal tone, clear from the first few lines, makes a grand message about the baseness of war, and shifts the reader’s focus away from the singular central soldier. Each stanza furthers the poem’s pessimistic view of war, and the third and final stanza essentially dismisses the soldier’s life as meaningless. Jarrell’s poem, with its cynical tone and evocative descriptions
In the second and third lines, the poet uses three similes which vary in nature. They share one common theme, for the most part: the immorality of war. “He picks up matches and he cleans out plates / Is lied to like a child, cursed like a beast. / They crop his head, his dog tags ring like sheep, / As his stiff limbs shift wearily to sleep” (Jarrell 5-8). The soldier performs such menial tasks as picking up trash and washing dishes, which might make him wonder why he gave it all up to fight in this war. His supervisors lie to him frequently, as if he was a child. He also “cursed like a beast”, which represents the inhumanity of being a soldier. He has gone from a human at home to a savage at war, treated and acting as if he was a dangerous animal during battle. When “they crop his head”, they are closely cutting the soldier’s hair into a crew cut, so that he looks almost exactly like everyone in his troop. Jarrell then uses the particularly vivid imagery of “his dog tags [ringing] like sheep.” As he and his fellow soldiers march into battle with enemy forces, the military-issued dog tags that hang around each of their necks ring loudly. The dog tags might also ring as the soldier destroys houses or, worse, kills people. This imagery haunts the soldier at night while he tries to sleep - instead of counting sheep. Jarrell draws a comparison between servicemen and sheep. Like soldiers, sheep also move in a herd, obediently
“And his dull torment mottles like a fly’s” (12). He compares the soldier’s torment to that of a fly - buzzing around in circles, trying to harm others, without any means of escape or end. The soldier longs to return to his family, but no, he must keep buzzing just as a fly does. He follows his comrades, his fellow flies, into the fight against his country’s enemy. But does he know why, or when it will ever end? Jarrell completes the poem aptly with the final line, “The lying amber of the histories.” When a tree falls, its sap (or amber) can live on forever, preserving anything within it. The soldier and his war may be preserved through historical amber. War history’s amber lies in museums and battlefields everywhere, and some of that history might actually be lying to those who study it. Jarrell’s use of “lie” could be a metaphorical double entendre, in that history often lies to us, and the winners always write history of wars. Particularly brutal wars might be inaccurately cast as nondestructive or even helpful to the societies that the winners crushed. Examples include the wars America waged against Vietnam and more recently, Afghanistan. Those are just two wars out of thousands, which have wrecked societies, killed billions, and defined our