Monday, February 5, 2007

90 North

"90 North" by Randall Jarrell (p. 56-57)

I was drawn to this poem because of the title; I assumed that the number 90 in the title referenced the number of degrees in the angle to find the North Pole (90 degree angle/right angle). At second thought, the title seems to be slightly redundant in that North is obviously 90 degrees North of the Equator, and North is simply a direction that indicates directly "upward" from the Equator.

The poem is broken into eight stanzas, each with four lines (with the exception of the third stanza, which contains a fifth indented line). The number of stanzas seems to fill the space between each 10-degree mark from the Equator, and every line could count for about two degrees. At the beginning, and end of the poem, the speaker seems to be at home, about to sleep at night in bed. He first mentions a long voyage with his "furs" and "dogs," and only in his voyage he mentions that he has a black beard. The imagery seems particular; he only describes the way the snow falls and the thoughts he has after his "voyage." This could signify that reaching a final goal in life requires the determination to survive through the cold and ruthlessness that will attempt to bring suffering into one's life. He seems to mention this idea of pain especially at the end, where he essentially states that wisdom is pain: without pain (physical or psychological), we will not learn, and therefore to possess wisdom is to have experienced pain previously.

The speaker seems to have described the processes that occurred when he fell asleep in his bed at night, and then woke up the next morning, as mirrored as like that of what seems to be the dream of traveling to the North Pole with dogs. The climactic point of the dream is probably when he places the flag into the ice at the North Pole, and the process of waking up could be seen through his travel South. The last three stanzas seem to mainly speak about his thoughts after waking up and reflecting on the dream, where he realized that in surviving through the darkness (sleeping through the night), he was able to learn that life requires pain to reach a climactic point.

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