Protocols (1945). Detailed description

“Protocols,” as do many of Jarrell’s poems, employs speakers who are trapped. Like the speaker of “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” the two speakers of “Protocols,” innocent and vulnerable, are awaiting death, describing its approach in an impressionistic manner. Both poems are examples of how Jarrell juxtaposes the naivete of youth with the morbid disillusionment we have known since we learned of the “final solution.” Jarrell uses this discontinuity between persona and theme to create a vision of the world where birth and death intertwine, a world where lived experience is tragically short.

As in “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” anonymous speakers reveal themselves as victims of the Holocaust at the end of “Protocols.” This time, though, Jarrell’s speakers are vulnerable children who represent the helplessness of the downtrodden at the whim of global powers. In a letter to Robert Lowell, Jarrell wrote, “If you’ll notice, I’ve never written a poem about myself in the army or war, unless you’re vain or silly you realize that you, except insofar as you’re exactly in the same boat as the others, aren’t the primary subject of any sensible writing about the war” (quoted in Goldman 194).

Unlike the soldier in “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” who reveals his gruesome death, these child speakers do not know the dangers of the “water in a pipe” (9), the death-camp shower pipe with its fatal gas. The poem’s two children might represent the naivete of European Jews, who did not see the evil threatening them, or, more generally, of the entire world, which was also caught unaware and in denial.

The two child speakers remain unknown, anonymous, and representative of the concentration camp victims at Birkenau and Odessa. Their recollections bleed into one another as they narrate fragments of their respective journeys to the gas chamber and the showers. Their pregnant observations from the grave are immediate, and deceptively simple. Jarrell’s metaphor for facing death, “The water there is deeper than the world. . . . And the water drank me,” is profoundly cynical, devoid of meaning, a lack, at once grotesque in its depiction, at the same time the poem is imagistic. In this way, the reader experiences a sense of disconnection between the beauty and simplicity of the images and the horror of the events taking place. As with the speakers, so also is the reader confined, trapped, in a narrow interpretive space, yet incapable of feeling any sense of resolution.

For Discussion or Writing
1. Read two other Jarrell poems that have child speakers: “The Truth” and “We Are Seven.” Having read these two, compare the speakers in all three. Write an essay that first classifies the three speakers and assesses their role in helping the poem to be understood: How do these speakers engage the reader?

2. Read two poems of Sylvia Plath, “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” both of which contain Holocaust references. Then, compare the way Plath represents and uses the Holocaust with the way Jarrell represents and uses it in “Protocols.” What do these two poets have in common? How do they differ?

3. Read Elie Wiesel’s Night, a short novel about the Holocaust that tells the story of a child who survives the death camp Auschwitz. Then, compare/ contrast Night with “Protocols.” What do the two have in common? What differences can you find? How do the two authors’ perspectives differ? Why do they differ?

4. Visit one of the Web sites regarding the Holocaust and look for stories about the children of the concentration camp. Then, evaluate Jarrell’s poem. How does it compare with the accounts you have read? How does it differ? Why might a poem be a more effective way to communicate such events than the narrative accounts you have read? Decide ultimately whether Jarrell is successful at what he is trying to accomplish.