marginalia following the fox
Dec 23, 2019
I came across it last evening from a paper quarto of advanced age, Randall Jarrell’s Selected Poems. I could not find reproductions online to share in good practice, so, it being the namesake date and out of reach of copywrite, I affected to transcribe the punctuation and spacing from the book’s brittle leaves.
The Night Before the Night Before Christmas (1934)
Randall Jarrell
In the Arden Apartments
Only a community center and an apartment
From the new lots and the old forest
Of Hillsboro Manor
Lived a girl and her father,
Her aunt, and her one brother.
Nights, warm in her bed,
The girl would still dream of her mother
Who, two years dead,
Looks more like her sister than her mother
-So they had said-
And lays, slowly, a dark shining head
On the dark, stooped shoulder
Of the girl’s new teacher.
Is there any question?
The girl has forgotten to answer
And watches him open the door of the cab
That is bringing an invitation to the Dance:
Till Mother disappears in fur,
The girl trails toward the house
And stares at her bitten nails, her bare red knees-
And presses her chapped, cold hands together
In a midday blouse.
The night before the night before Christmas
Her brother looked out over the snow
That had fallen all day, and saw her
At last, two floors below,
And knocked at the window–drawn over, frosted over–
Till she waved and made an O
With her mouth–she was calling.
As she climbed the stairs the snow
Stopped falling, she saw from the landing
Past the big old houses, the small new houses,
And the wood’s scrambling boughs
The sun in the hills. . . .
Home, home.
She throws her books on the sofa,
And the boy, from his bed,
Calls to her: “Mother, what is snow?”
She answers: “It is the cotton-wool, my Son,
That is falling from the ears of God.”
And the boy says: “Ho ho ho!
But tell me, Mother,
Why does He keep it in His ears?”
She answers:
“My Son, that He may not hear
How hideously men use His name.”
The boy calls, “No, misuse, misuse!”
She says, “It’s just the same.”
But she says to herself as she turns on the lights in the room:
“How hideously men use His name. . . .”
And she and her father eat dinner with her aunt
And she carries a tray to her brother;
She can hear carols from the radio
In the living-room, as she looks for dominoes.
After that she offers to read her brother
Another chapter from The Iron Heel.
“No, read me from Stalky.”
She starts to, but says, “When I was your age
I read it all the time.” He answers, “It’s not real.”
She cries, “Oh, isn’t it! Why, in Germany—”
But she stops and finally says, “Well . . .”
And reads about Regulus leaving, full of courage,
For that nigger Manchester, Carthage.
She reads it that Negro Manchester,
But it’s just the same, he doesn’t understand.
She laughs, and says to her brother:
“Engels lived in Manchester.”
The boy says: “Who was Engels?”
She says: “Don’t you even remember that?”
In her room that night she looks at herself in the mirror
And thinks: “Do I really look like that?”
She stares at her hair;
It’s really a beautiful golden—anyway, yellow:
She brushes it with affection
And combs her bang back over so it slants.
How white her teeth are.
A turned-up nose . . .
No, it’s no use.
She thinks: What do I really looks like?
I don’t know.
Not really.
Really.
Some dolls and a letter sweater
And a beige fur bear,
A Pink and a Golden and a Blue
Fairy Book, all, all in a row
Beam from the light, bright, white-starred blue
Of the walls, the clouding curtains—
Anachronisms
East of the sun and west of the moon.
She wraps in white tissue paper
A shining Coming Struggle for Power
For her best friend—
And ties it, one gold, gritty end
Of the string in her mouth, and one in her left hand;
Her right forefinger presses down the knot. . . .
She wraps some improving and delightful
Things she got for her brother
And one medium-sized present she got for her aunt
And the gloves she has knitted, the tie she has picked
For her father—poor Lion,
Poor Moose.
She’d give him something that means something
But it’s no use:
People are so dumb.
She thinks with regretful indignation:
“Why, he might as well not be alive . . .”
And sees all the mottoes at his office,
Like Do It Now
And To Travel Hopefully
Is A Better Thing Than To Arrive.
Still, he was sorry when my squirrel . . .
He was sorry as brother when my squirrel . . .
When the gifts are wrapped she reads.
Outside, the wind is—whatever it is;
Inside, it is its own old
Terrible comfortable self:
A ghost in a story—it is all a story.
An uneasy, rocking, comfortable tune
Keeps singing itself under the cold words
In her warm head—cold world
In her warm head—
in Praise of Learnings:
LEARN it, Women in KITCHens . . .
LEARN it, MEN of SEVenty . . .
She goes on turning
The big small-printed pages—
A kind of world . . .
Use-, surplus-, and exchange-
Value (all these, and plain
Value)
Creak slowly by, the wagon groans—
Creak by, like rags, like bottles—
Like rags, like bottles, like old bones . . .
The bones of men. Her breath is quickened
With pitying, indignant pain.
She thinks: That’s funny . . .
That’s funny: a Cyclopean machine . . .
It blinks at her with one blind eye.
Who put your eye out?
No one.
Watching with parted lips,
A shy sidelong stare,
She makes out, far off, among columns
Of figures, the children laboring:
A figure buried among figures
Looks at her beggingly, a beast in pain.
She puts her hand
Out into the darkness till it touches:
Her flesh freezes, in that instant, to the iron
And pulls away in blood.
The tears of pain,
Of her own passive, guilty, useless pain
Swell in her eyes, she blinks them over and over
LEARN it, MEN of SEVen
By your mothers in the mills—
WHAT you don’t LEARN yourSELF you don’t KNOW.
She thinks of her brother going down
To the pits with the ponies, too soon for the sun,
And coming back black, too late for the sun—
No school—he wouldn’t even know
Who God is, like the one
In the book—
not even know
Enough not to believe in God . . .
She thinks, as she has thought,
Her worn old thought,
By now one word:
“But how could this world be
If he’s all powerful, all-good?
No—there’s no God.”
She reads.
The figures, the values, the one Value
Are clothed with the cloud of her breathing—
The voice echoing over
The dark stooped shoulder
Ends, hissing a little: “is unjust.”
The hiss blurs in her head
With the hiss of her slow breath,
The lumps of her feet, her lashes
Stuck fast together, washed shut forever, on the wave
Of . . . that is washing, over and over, on the shore
Of . . . something . . . Something . . .
But her head jerks straight,
The song strengthens, its last words strike home:
YOU must be READy to take POWer!
YOU must be READy to take POWer!
She is reading a Factory ACT, a girl in a room.
And afterwards—the room is getting colder
And she is too tired to hold her head up any longer—
She puts away her book
And gives her hair its counted-off
Strokes, and works in and wipes off
Some cold cream from her jar
Of Rexall’s Theatrical Cold Cream; and puts on, yawning
Over and over, her boy’s blue silk pajamas,
Her white birthday Angora
Bed-socks. She puts up the window—
Her radiator clanks a minute
As someone in the basement banks
The furnace for the night—
And she puts out the light.
She lies half-in, half-out of moonlight
In the sheer cold of the fresh
Sheets, under the patched star-pattern
Of the quilt, and, curled there, warms a world
Out slowly, a wobbling blind ellipse
That lengthens in half a dozen jumps
Of her numb striking feet,
Steadies . . . A train wails, over and over,
At a crossing. “It’s like Martha,”
She mumbles. “So’s the radiator.”
The long, mourning, hollow questions
Of Martha Locomotive-Engineer
(You can get more than a snore
From Martha Janitor, asleep by now
On his brass bed in the basement)
Vex Mary, in her bed-socks, listening guiltily
To the hollow answers of her Lord.
The poor, the poor . . .
Her wandering mind
Comes to what was a joy,
What is a sorrow—
A cave opening into the dark
Earth, down to the dead:
What, played with day after day,
Stroked, called to, fed
In the small, wild, straggling park—
Told of, night after night, to the boy
Who listened, longing, among the games
Strewn on his rumpled bed—
was gone, one winter day.
She thought: “Tomorrow
He will be where he always is”; and tomorrow
She thought: “He will be here again, tomorrow.
He is asleep with all the other squirrels
There in the hollow of his favorite tree.
He is living on all the nuts he hid
In his cave in the hollow tree.”
On warm days, all that winter,
All the warm days of the spring,
She saw the others—never hers;
She thought, trying not to think, “Why, anything
Could have happened to him”; she thought, as the living
Think of their life, “Oh, it’s not right!”
The squirrels are chattering
From leaf to leaf, as her squirrel chattered:
The Poor, the Poor . . .
They have eaten, rapidly,
From her hand, as though to say:
“But you won’t hurt me, will you? Will you?”
They have nothing to lose but their lives.
She looks home into
The lancing eyes
In the rat-like face, the sucking
Fish-hooks of the little paws: a clawed
Rat with an Angora tail. A clawed
Dead rat with an Angora tail.
There is something deep
Under her will, against her will,
That keeps murmuring to her, “It’s so”;
And she murmurs, almost asleep:
“Unjust—no, it’s not so.
If he were educated . . .”
She sees six squirrels in a row
Thinking in chorus, in slow, low,
Hissing, radiator-steam-valve voices:
“Wherefore Art Thou, Romeo?”
The big squirrel says “No.
No, that is not just it.
Try it again.”
Their skein-silk lashes
Tremble, and they look sidelong up at her—
And cry, softly, in their sly,
Dumb, scared, malicious pain . . .
And try again.
A dream, a dream.
She whispers: “I’m awake.
No, I’m not dreaming, I’m awake.”
There is no more moonlight.
Out there, there is darkness and light,
The cold of night.
The world is no longer hidden
By the fire of her lit room,
By the day of the light of the sun.
Out there nothing moves except with a faint
Choked straining shiver;
Sounds except with a faint
Choked croaking sigh.
They are all there together.
Up over
The last twig, in the wild still sky,
Far under the last root, in the wild still sky,
There is another galaxy
Of so many hundreds of thousands of stars
So many hundreds of thousands of years
Away; and it is one
Of so many hundreds of thousands
Of galaxies—some like our own.
It is good, it is evil?
The girl gives her long straining sigh—
In the cells of the needles of the branches
Of the evergreens, the sap is ice.
Whenever the girl stares—
Hung out over, hung out under
The abyss that is her home—
There is something, something: the universe
Is a mirror backed with black
Out of which her face shines back
In the midst of hundreds of millions of suns.
In the fields outside
There is not one step on the snow,
And each bough is bent with the burden
That is greater almost than it can bear.
The breaths of a world are webs
Of angelhair,
Of glass spun, life by iife,
Into the trees’ earned, magic tinsel.
A handful
Of snowflakes falls from a branch to a bush;
A star hovers
At the tip of a frozen spruce.
It disappears.
(At the sides of the shepherds Hansel
Stands hand in hand with Gretel
And sparkles, like a sparkling star,
Like Lot’s own wife:
Bushes, bushes.)
When the owl calls nothing answers.
In the owl’s lungs, strained through feathers, A breath is the edge of a knife. . . .
The haze of the girl’s slow breaths,
Of her spun-sugar, cotton-candy breath,
Floats up, clouding the printed stars
Of the faint walls: white
As the down of the wings of an angel; white
As the beard of Fredrich Engels . . .
In the fields there is not one angel.
In all these fields
There is not one thing that knows
It is almost Christmas.
Staring, staring
At the gray squirrel dead in the snow,
She and her brother float up from the snow—
The last crumbs of their tears
Are caught by the birds that are falling
To strew their leaves on the snow
That is covering, that has covered
The play-mound under the snow. . . .
The leaves are the snow, the birds are the snow,
The boy and the girl in the leaves of their grave
Are the wings of the bird of the snow.
But her wings are mixed in her head with the Way
That streams from their shoulders, stars like snow:
They spread, at last, their great starry wings
And her brother sings, “I am, dying.”
“No: it’s not so, not so—
Not really,”
She thinks, but she says, “You are dying.”
He says, “I didn’t know.”
And she cries: “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!”
They are flying.
They look down over the earth.
There is not one crumb.
The rays of the stars of their wings
Strike the boughs of the wood, and the shadows
Are caught up into the night,
The first faint whisper of the wind:
Home, home, whispers the wind;
There are shadows of stars, a working
Hand in the . . .
There are words on the graves of the snow.
She whispers, “When I was alive,
I read them all the time.
I read them all the time.”
And she whispers, sighing:
“When I was alive . . .”
And, moving her licked, chapped, parted lips,
She reads from the white limbs’ vanished leaves:
To End Hopefully
Is A Better Thing—
A Far, Far Better Thing—
It is a far, far better thing . . .
She feels in her hand, her brother’s hand.
She is crying.
Jarrell writes, “The Night Before the Night Before Christmas takes place in the years 1934; the girl is fourteen. The part about the “cotton-wool that is falling from the ears of God” is a Scandinavian joke that has become a family joke in the little family of the girl and her brother. The Iron Heel is a book by Jack London about the workers fight against the fascist state of the future. The Coming Struggle for Power is a book, once well known, by John Strachey. The girl’s father is a Lion, a Moose, just as he might be an elk, a Rotarian, or Kiwanian. “In Praise of Learning” is a song, very firm and haunting, with words by Bert Brecht and music by Hans Eisler; in those days it ran through many heads besides the girl’s. Both Engels and Marx are real and present figures to the girl, who has got as far, in Capital, as the chapter on the working day, and is reading it that night. She has read A Tale of Two Cities at school, and Sydney Carton’s “It is a far, far better thing I do . . .” is there in her mind along with Martha and Mary, her squirrel, her brother, and all the other people less fortunate than she.
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