North (1942). Detailed description

Jarrell’s first independent book of poems, Blood for a Stranger, included the dark and pain-filled poem “90 North,” a poem about a boy’s dream to trek to the North Pole and a man’s reluctance to return from the top of the world. The collection came out the same year he enlisted in the air force and was published after a selection of his poems (“The Rage for the Lost Penny”) debuted in 1940. As suggested by the title, which refers to the latitude of the North Pole, the setting takes on an important role in telling the story of loneliness and isolation. Similarly, Jarrell relied on important settings in the concentration camp poem “Protocols,” and in the hot desert poem “Second Air Force.”

In “90 North,” the setting is the coldest, darkest, loneliest, harshest place on Earth. A child and an adult speaker alternately express the loneliness and pain of the troubled 26-year-old poet. For the child, who speaks first, the North Pole is a magical world, a place of happiness, joy, and adventure. The child climbs into bed, drifts off to sleep, and dreams. When he meets challenges on his expedition, he wakes from his dream and returns to the comfort of his bed “in [his] flannel gown” (1).

The adult speaker has no such retreat, however, and encounters a spinning world where all lines and winds converge in a meaningless whirlpool. With no means to escape his nightmare, the adult speaker says, “Turn as I please, my step is to the south” (13). In the next stanza the speaker’s death is foretold: “the flakes came huddling, / Were they really my end?” (7-8). Here, the child and adult worlds overlap. The speaker gives a short, childlike reason for leaving behind the nightmare of starving, freezing, and suffocating: “In the darkness I turned to my rest” (8).

However, to the adult speaker who understands the effects of hyperthermia, “to my rest” is the resigned slip into unconsciousness before life’s final rest. Stephen Burt notes that the child speaker learns a valuable lesson: “Jarrell’s [child] dreamer expected sublimity and wisdom from a summit, but learns instead that he must go back down” (23). For the speaker the experience yields no wisdom. In the famous last line’s defiant declaration, the weathered speaker laments that the experience did not provide the knowledge he sought. Instead, “It is pain” he discovers.

For Discussion or Writing
1. Jarrell provides two different speakers with different perspectives about the issues presented in “90 North.” How do these two speakers differ? Why does Jarrell provide two speakers? What effect does this have?

2. Compare this poem with Jarrell’s later work “Well Water,” one of his final poems. How does he define meaning in each? If one were to extrapolate a vision of what is real from the poems, how would the two poems differ? With all of this in mind, can you say that Jarrell’s worldview changed, or was it static?

3. For many philosophers, the key to life’s meaning lies in suffering and how we respond to it. On one level, this poem deals with the nature of suffering and its meaning. In fact, one might be able to arrive at an explanation of our lives from the poem. What philosophy of life does this poem suggest? What would the consequences of living such a life be?