Randall Jarrell and the Unreachable Home

Randall Jarrell's poem "A Ward in the States" is a haunting examination of the mind's inability to unify itself and place itself in a satisfactory relationship with the world. More specfically, the poem complicates the notion of "home" and what it means to be in the world.

It begins with images that contrasts inside and outside:

The ward is barred with moonlight,
The owl hoots from the snowy park.
The wind of the rimed, bare branches
Slips coldly into the dark

Warmed ward where the muttering soldiers
Toss, dreaming that they still sigh
For home, for home;

The light from outside enters the ward, but it is affected by the inside: it is "barred," parts of it are in shadow and therefore missing. Similarly, the inside is affected by the outside, as the cold from outside slips into the ward. Jarrell insists that this is a problematic boundary.

Jarrell builds on this problematic physical boundary by contructing an equally permeable boundary between past experience and the present situation. The soldiers, who are in "the States," are dreaming of the islands that "Are stretched interminably / Past their lives." These are the islands in the South Pacific during the Second World War from which the soldiers had returned. The past continues to infect/affect the present.

The persistence of the past is so thoroughgoing that it enters their sleep. Whatever events occurred on those islands, which remain nameless in the poem but were present in the cultural background from which this poem emerged, are left unspoken. The reader hears only their "sigh / For home."

The rich irony that the poem develops, however, is that the soldiers still sigh for home when they are home. They are "in the States," no longer on the islands. But home is not stable enough to endure experience. Seemingly, their "one wish" has been achieved, but they continue to desire it. Jarrell includes a significant line break to emphasize this impossibility: "Ah, one lies warm / With fever." The line initially seems to posit a warm and therefore comfortable sleep, but then he punctures this with the addition of "With fever." The soldiers are haunted by dreams.

Throughout the poem, it seems clear that a stable and comfortable state is impossible, and it seems meaningful that Jarrell has included "the States" in the title: these soldiers exist in a series of states that are invariably implicated in one another. The purity of a "state" of being cannot be achieved. Instead, their "Lips chatter their old sigh," once again confirming that their "one wish" of a stable home is impossible.

Jarrell ends the poem by carefully bookending the moonlight. It appeared at the beginning as the intrusion of the external world, and it ends the poem as the poet's retreat to the objective perspective that generalizes the individual struggles at the same time it diminishes those struggles. It's like when a movie pans away from the protagonist at the end to show a tree-lined street; the object world abides despite our struggles. This itself is an ironic and ambivalent twist in the sense that Jarrell's strategy in the poem was to suggest that physical space/location is in no sense ultimate -- at least from the perspective of the subject. Home as a physical location does not contain meaning within it.