23 Jun The third figurative pattern of the poem suggests an image of birth.
The third figurative pattern of the poem suggests an image of birth.
From my mothers sleep I fell into the State
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
We see a soldier, fetally positioned, in the sac-like turret under the aircrafts “belly.” Yet the pronoun its of “its belly” refers to the aircraft only because of image-correspondence: the antecedent to the pronoun its is either the State or the mother. Are children born for the State? Are the States offspring its aircraft? The birth imagery of the poem symbolically suggest the answers to these questions; the soldier is “wet,” floating in amniotic fluid; he is visually attached to his “mother,” the plane, via umbilical cord-like machine guns and “hose” (line 5). He is even washed as a newborn would be cleansed upon emergence from the womb. The traumatic shock of birth, of separation from the womb, is overwhelming. For the speakers birth is a miscarriage; he “falls” from his mother, hurtled unprepared for his new and harsh environment, the state of war.
Jarrells poem is perhaps unequalled in the compacted power of its suggestive imagery. In five short lines the poet asks us to consider sleep that is not sleep but semi-conscious numbness and nightmare; he asks us to contemplate men who are not men but animals subjected to the outrageous conditions of fear and harm; he asks us to understand birth that is not life but birth that is death.
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