Yesterday I visited the grave of Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965. Besides being a poet and professor, he was the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for 1956-1958, now known as the Poet Laureate of the United States.
He’s buried in the New Garden Friends Meeting graveyard, right across the street from Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, though he taught at the nearby Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina which is now just called UNC Greensboro.
While his slab was baking in the late August sun, the rest of the cemetery had plenty of shade and simple stones. I probably have a few ancestors buried there too but they died before Quakers marked graves.
Jarrell wasn’t Quaker (he served in the U.S. Army Air Forces during Word War II) but his most anthologized poem, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, if not explicitly pacifist, certainly does not glorify war.
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
I’ll commend another poem of his, The Woman at the Washington Zoo.
He was killed along a stretch of road that I know well, just south of Chapel Hill, though I’m sure it’s quite different now, 55 years later. He was walking near dusk and struck by a car. In the last couple of years of life he had been depressed, hospitalized and on medication. Officially it was an accident, not suicide, but we’ll never know for sure.
And it’s none of our business anyway.
Bartholomew Barker, Poet 
Interesting read. I’ll have to explore his poems.
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Forgot to add that I liked your last sentence.
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Thanks!
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I agree with Lisa. It is interesting and yes, a good, if rather ironic last sentence. I really like The Woman at the Washington Zoo poem.
Does the crescent moon and two stars symbolize anything?
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I was wondering that too as I stood at his grave. At least the stars are outside of the moon. (Sometimes you’ll see stars within the crescent, something one wouldn’t see unless something astronomically bad were happening.) After a cursory internet search, I still don’t know. Nothing seemed I read online seemed to fit. I’m open to suggestions.
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I know a crescent moon and one star is used for the Muslim faith but this is two stars.
I found this page: http://www.thecemeteryclub.com/symbols.html – Nothing on there fits, so, I dunno either.
Oh wait. This poet I know recently said, “And it’s none of our business anyway.” Huzzah!
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That poet you mentioned is obviously a poetaster. I wonder if Prof. Jarrell had any grandkids that might know.
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I was able to find a granddaughter of Mary von Schrader Jarrell and she wrote that “the crescent moon and two stars were a symbol that Randall invented to depict his and my grandmother’s love for each other.”
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