Randall Jarrell Poem Analysis

Randall Jarrell, poet, critic, essayist, and former Poet Laureate of the United States, was born in 1914 in Nashville Tennessee and attended Vanderbilt University in that same city. There, Jarrell received his BA and MA studying under John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren. His poetry is influenced by W.H. Auden and Robert Frost and often uses what poets call “the common dialogue of Americans.” He passed away October 14th, 1965. The speaker of this poem is going through an identity crisis. They are dull and don’t see themselves having a personality. They see women in beautiful saris in the beginning of the poem and revel in how exotic and interesting they are or appear to be. Simultaneously they are conscious of their own bland way of life
The poem begins with a comparison between the colorful, alien saris made of “cloth from another planet” and her own “dull null Navy” that she wears every day. If you dig deeper, however, the implicit interpretation is how the speaker traps herself in a cage like the zoo animals. Claiming her able body is her bars, she cannot be noticed like the other zoo animals. She compares herself to the “white rat the foxes left” instead of the wondrous zoo animals people flock to see. She sees herself as forgotten and wants to break free of her monotonous life. Instead of being the someone without complaints nor comments, the subject wants people to wonder at her like she wonders at the saris as they walk
Jarrell wanted to show a woman who sees other women in happy colored saris compared to a leopard and immediately assumes that woman’s life is better than hers. Now, the first woman doesn’t know the sari wearing woman at all, her life may be unfulfilling to her, but the first woman sees the worst in herself when comparing herself to other women. The woman at the zoo may have a boring, dull life that she trapped herself in, and when she sees other women happy, she is resentful and wishes she had maybe chosen a different path than she did. Then, the woman compares herself to the food of other animals. She wants the “vultures” or the people taking advantage of her to give her the motivation to change her lifestyle from predictable to spontaneous, dull to interesting, monotonous to