Randell Jarrell

He was a teacher, also a poet. He writes and this first one is about WWII. He has a great deal of sympathy for the people in the war. He trained as a Army Air Force pilot and as a control operator. He has a sense of the war's special casualties. He talks about the soldiers as being both destructive and innocent. Remember Operation Desert Storm, here are these guys going out to smoke some camels, as they like to say or blow up some Iraqi's, but first they are sitting down to a big bowl of Fruit Loops. I was thinking, you know, these are kids. You know, many of them are younger than you here in the classroom. And yet they are called upon, all of a sudden, to perform these really adult activities. So there's that strange combination, and we find that especially in "Second Air Force."
 

"Well Water" Notes

What a girl called "the dailiness of life"
(Adding an errand to your errand. Saying,
"Since you're up . . ." Making you a means to
A means to a means to)

Have you ever had that happen? You're sitting at the table eating lunch, and you know that if you every get up you'll wind up having to bring stuff for everyone else. So this is the dailiness of life. It's made up of little bitty details, rather than great big events. What a girl calls the dailiness of life is well water. As you can see the sentence continues after the parenthesis.

                                    is well water
Pumped from an old well at the bottom of the world.
The pump you pump the water from is rusty
And hard to move and absurd, a squirrel-wheel
A sick squirrel turns slowly, through the sunny
Inexorable hours.

So life is this water pumped up from this deep well slowly, minute by minute.

                                And yet sometimes
the wheel turns of its own weight, the rusty
Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear
Water, cold, so cold! you cup our hands
And gulp from them the dailiness of life.
 

Here we have this life creeping on, minute by minute. But, suddenly the wheel turns and cold water comes out and refreshes you, so there are these moments of renewal. It's a rather hopeful poem.