Next Day By Randall Jarrell Essay Research

triggers a rush of nostalgia in stanzas three and

four, as the woman thinks back to when she was

?young and miserable and pretty,? when she wanted

what she has now. But now her ?wish/ Is womanish:?

she wants what she had then. She realizes that she

was miserable, yet she wants it anyway. It was

exciting; she was an individual, not part of a

Food-gathering flock, and people noticed her. ?I

was good enough to eat: the world looked at me/

And its mouth watered.? Now, in line 27, the boy

takes notice of the dog over her.

Lines 24-25, ?And, holding their flesh within my

flesh, their vile/Imaginings within my imagining,?

most likely refer to sexual experiences she had in

youth with which she was less than overjoyed. But

it could also be said that now, looking back, part

of her is sorry that that era of her life is gone,

and now such ?vile/ Imaginings? exist only within

her imagining. At some point she gave that life up

and took ?the chance of life,? perhaps marriage.

She thinks back again, on the drive home in lines

29-34, to that last illicit sexual moment, and how

glorious it seems in her memory. She recalls how

it left, at its finale, ?upon the palm/Some soap

and water? (Joy?), and then she is snapped back

into reality, perhaps by a green light, and thinks

of her family. She realizes in the next few lines

that it is not her life that she wishes would

revert to that of her ?Gay/ Twenties,? but she

herself, and her body. She is very happy with her

life, and does not want it to change. ?As I look

at my life,/ I am afraid/ Only that it will

change, as I am changing.? She is upset about

getting old, not about a stagnant life. Her ?sure

and unvarying days? give her life meaning, truth.

In the ninth stanza the speaker talks about the

funeral of a friend she attended the day before.

She found that her dead friend reminded her of

herself. ?My friend?s cold made-up face, .?.?.

dressed body/ Were my face and body,? writes

Jarrell, using a three-line metaphor. Within this

is another metaphor, where Jarrell describes the

friend?s face as ?granite among its flowers.?

The speaker sees herself as becoming this woman;

she doesn?t have long to go. But then she imagines

her friend telling her how young she is, and this

is the voice of reason. The woman realizes she is

not so old, really, and that she is an individual,

special and exceptional. She counts her blessings,

momentarily out of the All and into the Cheer,

seeing the brighter (colors or whites?) side of

things as an allied third party, alive or dead,

would see them.

This epiphany does not last long, alas, and the

speaker again feels lost, again feels anonymous

and unimportant and old. She realizes, however,

that it is not her problem exclusively; ?no one is

exceptional,? she says, ?no one has anything.?

This is why the poem is appealing despite its

sentimentality. It truly speaks to everyone. The

feelings which the speaker is experiencing are

what drive people to buy fast cars, get facelifts,

and abandon their families. Genetics aside, these

emotions are the root of m