"Losses" Randal Jarrell

"Losses" Randal Jarrell

While reading “Losses” by Randal Jarrell, I experience strong feelings related to a bloody war- sadness, fear, tragedy and helplessness. Being the poem’s main topic, Death, itself, evokes powerful and disturbing images. Dark and stormy skies, shootings and bomb attacks and the image of hundreds of dead bodies lying on the floor, come all to my mind, leaving a feeling of sorrow.  Also, the poem suggests a plaintive melody, one that immediately stirs deep and genuine emotions.
Jarrell’s poem states all different “kinds of death” that a war can cause. Some people die by accident while training, others in conflict and only the “lucky” ones are awarded medals.  Life seems to have no meaning. Soldiers die and nobody realises the importance of that.

In my opinion, this poem can be compared with “To the Lighthouse”, by Virgina Woolf, in the sense that both deal with the topics of “death” and “war”. In “Time Passes,” Virginia Woolf records the deaths of three major characters: Mrs. Ramsay, who dies of unspecified causes, her daughter Prue, who dies as a result of childbirth and her son Andrew, who dies in war- “A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous”.  I think that the phrase “Twenty or thirty young men were blown up”, ironically suggests, just as the poem, disregard for the deaths of these soldiers. Here again, “life” has no meaning and “death” becomes simply a matter of statistics.