Randall Jarrell and the Gap between Immanence and Transcendence

"A Country Life" by Randall Jarrell expresses concisely in one of its lines an overriding principle of Jarrell's work: "They are subdued to their own element." The poem examines the natural world in a location unfamiliar to the speaker. He wonders what the birds say when they speak. But he cannot ask the locals because he does not want to give himself away as an outsider.

This situation raises two crucial aspects of Jarrell's poetry. First, it broaches the subject of the physical world and its potential for human meaning. He describes the bird as a part of the concrete physical world, but also as an agent that might communicate something deeper:

The bird calls twice, "Red clay, red clay";
Or else he's saying, "Directly, directly."

The first of these lines is descriptive, conveying the world as it can be experienced by the senses. The second line introduces a relation to the world. The bird speaks of how the world is "directly" before us, or perhaps how he is responding to our presence "directly." In this second line, we understand the world not as a set of objects which may or may not be perceived, but a product of the act of perceiving. The gulf between these two lines, between the possibilities they raise, is the space within which Jarrell works.

The speaker reports that the local people, those who live within these elements, "know and they don't know." This is classic Jarrell. His work sometimes borders on confusion or senselessness because he so frequently proffers two contradictory contentions. But he's trying to get at the simultaneity of experience in and about the world. Another way of saying this is that he contemplates the distance between dumb immanence and communicative meaning. But asking those entrenched in the world to explain it "is dangerous":

Asked about it, who would not repent
Of all he ever did and never meant,
And think a life and its distresses,
Its random, clutched-for, homefelt blisses,
The circumstances of an accident?

For Jarrell, to ask for a definitive description of a mechanistic world is to threaten one with the recognition of the loss of free will. In this poem, immanence is antithetical to meaning. The importance of this point is emphasized when Jarrell raises the stakes in the final stanza, where death delivers the body to the clay. Death is a return to pure immanence; it is the inevitability of immanence.

But Jarrell insists on one of the other crucial aspects of his poetry: the continued dream of transcendence. He rarely argues for the possibility of transcendence, but he frequently examines our perpetual drive toward it. So even after the body is returned to the earth, a spiritual element remains:

After some words, the body is forsaken . . . .
The shadows lengthen, and a dreaming hope
Breathes, from the vague mound, Life;

This is a paradoxical turn, of course. While alive, the people could not explain the physical world because they would need to choose between immanence and transcendence, but after dying, they yearn for both. Jarrell suggests that we are caught between immanence and transcendence, and he, in fact, sees human existence as a breathless pause between the two. Only death seems to solve this dilemma, but at the cost of relinquishing both alternatives.