Second Air Force by Randall Jarrell
"Second Air Force" by Randall Jarrell is a poignant war poem that explores the emotional landscape of a mother visiting her son at a bomber training field. Through her eyes, the reader experiences the stark and alien environment filled with hangars and soldiers preparing for combat. The poem juxtaposes her personal fears and maternal love against the backdrop of military purpose, highlighting the vulnerability of the young men as they engage with the machinery of war. The mother reflects on a haunting newspaper conversation between a bomber and its protector, emphasizing the precarious nature of their lives. Jarrell captures the tension between the mother's inability to accept the soldiers' mission and their unwavering commitment to it. The poem is crafted in a form that closely resembles iambic pentameter, contributing to its rhythmic quality while conveying a sense of bleakness surrounding the military landscape. Overall, "Second Air Force" invites readers to contemplate the complex emotions tied to war, duty, and familial bonds.
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Subject Terms
Second Air Force by Randall Jarrell
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1944 (collected in Little Friend, Little Friend, 1945)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
One of Jarrell’s war poems that slants the issue through the eyes of a woman, this poem tells the story of a woman come to visit her son one afternoon at a bomber training field. She sees the landscape, the hangars, and the men working on the planes as an alien world.
Jarrell comments that the woman
remembers what she has read on the front page of her newspaper the week before, a conversation between a bomber, in flames over Germany, and one of the fighters protecting it: “Then I heard the bomber call me in, ’Little Friend, Little Friend, I got two engines on fire . . . .’ I said, ’I’m crossing right over you. Let’s go home.’”
The woman feels the night coming on and she fears for the young soldiers, innocent and purposeful, so vulnerable next to the arms and equipment they have to trust. She is not able to buy into their purpose—but they are not able to look beyond it. “For them the bombers answer everything.” The poem hovers near iambic pentameter, occasionally drawing in from it or opening out from it. The bleakness of the landscape and the presence of the death-machines are weighed against the love of the mother for her son and her fears for him.
Bibliography
Burt, Stephen. Randall Jarrell and His Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Chappell, Fred. “The Indivisible Presence of Randall Jarrell.” North Carolina Literary Review 1, no. 1 (Summer, 1992): 8-13.
Cyr, Marc D. “Randall Jarrell’s Answerable Style: Revision of Elegy in ’The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 46, no. 1 (Spring, 2004): 92-106.
Flynn, Richard. Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.
Hammer, Langdon. “Who Was Randall Jarrell?” Yale Review 79 (1990): 389-405.
Jarrell, Mary. Remembering Randall: A Memoir of Poet, Critic, and Teacher Randall Jarrell. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
Pritchard, William. Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life. New York: Farrar, 1990.
Quinn, Sr. Bernetta. Randall Jarrell. Boston: Twayne, 1981.