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Randall Jarrell's <i>The Bat Poet:</i> An Introduction to the Craft

1984; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chq.0.0570

1553-1201

Peter F. Neumeyer,

Themes in Literature Analysis

Randall Jarrell's The Bat Poet:An Introduction to the Craft Peter F. Neumeyer (bio) And now, that an overfaint quietness should seem to strew the house for Poets, they are almost in as good reputation, as the Mountibanks at Venice. Sir Philip Sidney Randall Jarrell's The Bat Poet is a children's animal story. But it is also much more. Through the development of the little bat who learns to say poetry, the book introduces children to the working concerns of a learning poet, and offers a mature and precise contemplation of the nature of poets and poetry. As such, its coverage is systematic and thorough to such a degree that I have, in fact, used it as a basic text in a poetry writing class for non-English majors. Short stories, my students may have seen before. But poems, they have hardly ever contemplated. They don't know what they are, how they come to be, how they exist in the universe. And they are afraid of them. They certainly don't think they can write poems. Instead of beginning right off by writing, therefore, we begin, rather unfashionably, with Jarrell's little forty-three page treatise disguised as a children's story. In a couple of days, our class is writing like other classes. But we have begun with a theoretical treatise accompanying a fledgling (literally) poet in his Lehrjahr. The situation in Jarrell's The Bat Poet is simply that a little bat, normally sleeping during sunlight hours, like his brothers and sisters, once ventures out in the daytime, hears the local poetaster, a mockingbird, imitating and making poems, and learns to do the same. The bat learns the facts of life about poems (and poets). I shall list these, just as the little bat learns them. 1. Poets see and observe. Toward the end of summer, all the bats except the little brown bat protagonist go to sleep in the barn. The little bat, however, stays awake in the daytime, and keeps his eyes open and looks, even though his brethren say accurately, "When you wake up in the daytime the light hurts your eyes—the thing to do is to close them and go right back to sleep." Literally, the artist sees what to others is invisible or painful. The poet as seer is a familiar figure, established since the dawn of literature. Enough here to say that artists as seers who hurt in the light of their vision have become major characters in modern literature by way of the Romantic imagination, and through the suffering personae of such as Byron, Hans Christian Andersen, James Joyce, and Thomas Mann. The artist is a seer; he is "different"; he pays a price in order to see in such a clear light. 2. What and how do artists see? They see what has not been perceived and articulated before (for the others have eyes, but they see not). It is the mockingbird, whom the little bat had heard often singing half the night through, who becomes the mentor for the little bat. The mockingbird "made up songs and words all his own, that nobody else had ever said or sung." The poet, (even the poetaster) is, thus, "originial." 3. What does the poet/seer, who is original, sing about? The poet/seer, in fact, sings about, mimics "the real world." He makes imitations. The mockingbird, would "imitate the way the squirrels chattered when they were angry, like two rocks being knocked together; and he could imitate the milk bottles being put down on the porch and the barn door closing, a long rusty [End Page 51] squeak." The mockingbird, and the bat apprentice-poet, imitate numerous other things and creatures as Jarrell's fable progresses. The chipmunk is Jarrell's straight man in the story. He asks the innocent questions which, when answered, set forth the book's theory of poetry. Thus, when the bat poet tells the chipmunk the poem portrait of the owl, "the chipmunk gave a big shiver and said, 'It's terrible, just terrible! Is there really something like that in the night?" In the same vein, when the bat poet...