Second Air Force (1945). Detailed description

This portrayal of a mother visiting an airfield after the death of her son during the war is another example of how women play an important role in Jarrell’s poetry. They represent the fragility and ineffectualness of the universal mother in protecting her children as seen in works like “Protocols.”

They serve as narrators of empty modern living in The Woman at the Washington Zoo. Jarrell also uses women’s voices in “developing a socially respectable way of coming to terms with his own divided sensibility” (Longenbach 50). “Well Water,” published in 1965, features a female speaker musing about the meaning of life while drawing water from a rusty pump. “Second Air Force,” included in Little Friend, Little Friend, captures the despair of all the loved ones left behind to grieve by depicting one mother’s grief over the death of her own son. A man’s overt expressions of such vulnerabilities during a time of war would not elicit the same kind of sympathy afforded to mothers anticipating the return of their sons. In his letters, Jarrell stated, “The mother is merely a vehicle of presentation, her situation merely a formal connection of the out-of-this-world field with the world” (quoted in Letters 132).

If the subject had been a man, maintaining this distance might seem appropriate, but by standing so “far off” (1) from a mother, the reader participates in the woman’s isolation. More tragically, the woman is further distanced from her son by viewing surroundings unfamiliar to her but intimately familiar to her son before his untimely death. In achieving this distance, Jarrell employs “the Wordsworthian and Keatsean dramatic lyric, wherein the speaker and landscape are interdependent” (Beck 69).

The landscape provides the tone of desolation and expansive emptiness. In the first line “the plain,” with its imagined expanse, renders the woman small against the enormity of war and the powers that took her son. In the second line, another reference to the landscape shows the degree to which war changes the natural order of things: Artificial hangars appear like “hills,” and “bubbling asphalt” (8) interrupts the “sage,” “the dunes,” and the “ranges” (9).

With Jarrell’s reference, once again, to the story of Little Friend, the bomber’s fighter escort, the elements in nature, to which every person can relate, are anthropomorphized and “[flames] eat, [the plane] rib by rib” (40). The plane is made human, and the bomber’s life, not the crew’s lives, “stream[s] out” (42).

For Discussion or Writing
1. What does the mother mean when she says, “The years meant this?” Why is this line significant?

2. Search the Internet for accounts of bomber and fighter pilots from World War II and examine “Second Air Force” and “Eighth Air Force” for details they have in common with actual accounts. In what ways would the details in and tone of “Second Air Force” need to be amended to give a more positive representation of an air force base?