And the world said, Child, you will not be missed. You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road; Your death is a table in a book. You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you: Man is the judgment of the world.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
"Variations," lines 40-44
- work
- Blood for a Stranger (1942)
- year
- 1942
Cite this record
“And the world said, Child, you will not be missed. You are c…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-B2D2663F79. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/b2d2663f79
More from Randall Jarrell
The weight and concentration of the poems fall upon things (and those great things, animals and people), in their tough, laconic, un-get-pastable plainness: they have kept the stolid and dangerous inertia of the objects of the sagas — the sword that snaps, the man looking at his lopped-off leg and saying, “That was a good stroke.”
President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.
Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels.