Losses (1945). Detailed description

“Losses” was published in Jarrell’s second collection of poetry, Little Friend, Little Friend, which takes it name from a haunting transcript of the radio communication between the crews of air force planes. In this transcript larger bomber planes are referred to as Big Friend, while smaller fighter planes are called Little Friend. During the exchange, “The bomber had both engines on fire when it called out to the fighter, ‘Little Friend, Little Friend, I got two engines on fire. Can you see me, Little Friend?’ To which the fighter responded, ‘I’m crossing right over you. Let’s go home’” (3).

Jarrell does not use the voice of innocence to convey a simpler and more optimistic view of life, as with the child in “90 North,” but to capture the naive experiences of boys who “burned the cities [they] had learned about in school” (22-23). Jarrell does not provide carefully constructed graphic details to recreate the horrors of war, as Wilfred Owen did in poems such as “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1921).

The speaker of Jarrell’s poem, a collective group of soldiers, has nothing but high school to compare death with; the soldiers die not in foreign trenches filled with bloody corpses, but “on the wrong page of the almanac” (6).

Jarrell used common everyday language throughout his career to reveal the deepest understandings of human experience. “Losses” is narrated by a group of soldiers who liken their deaths not to those of heroic figures, but to the mundane passing of “aunts or pets or foreigners” (10). In this way the dead soldiers speak for themselves, much like the anonymous and departed speaker of Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (1945) does. In the first line of the poem, the speaker trivializes death when he says, “we had died before,” as if death were commonplace (emphasis added, 2) which, of course, in wartime it was.

The soldiers’ deaths are minimized further when the speaker relates such routine tasks as writing home to parents and reading mail. By juxtaposing these everyday events with the soldiers’ deaths, Jarrell reiterates the speaker’s naivete. Yet in the poem’s final stanza, the speaker dreams of being asked by a destroyed city “‘But why did I die?’” (32). The city questions its death, but the soldiers never do. The speaker maintains, “It was not dying—no, not ever dying,” a line that reflects the soldier’s naivete and inability to understand the horrors of war (29).

For Discussion or Writing
1. Discuss the many ways that Jarrell employs repetition throughout the poem. What is the effect of these repetitions? Do you find them to be effective, distracting, or confusing? Why do you think this thoughtful writer used so many repetitions? How do the repetitions contribute to the poem’s meaning and form?

2. Read Jarrell’s “Eighth Air Force” and then compare/contrast that poem with “Losses.” What do the two say about youth? About soldiers? About war?

3. Compare T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land with Jarrell’s poem. What do the two have in common? How do they differ?

4. Eliot’s The Four Quartets was inspired by war experiences, just as Jarrell’s poem was, and reflects on the meaning of life from the perspective of death. Read the final Eliot quartet, “Little Gidding,” and compare Jarrell’s take on loss with Eliot’s. Finally, write a well-developed essay that compares/contrasts the two, noting especially how the two poets think about life’s meaning and purpose.