Well Water | Randall Jarrell | The New York Review of Books

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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) 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. 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 your hands
And gulp from them the dailiness of life.

Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) was born in Tennessee and graduated from Vanderbilt. A poet, novelist, translator, and critic as well as writer for children, Jarrell was a prolific author whose best-known works include the poems collected in The Woman at the Washington Zoo and The Lost World, the academic comedy Pictures from an Institution, the children's story The Bat Poet, and Poetry and the Age, a group of essays. An influential critic who, as poetry reviewer for The Nation, helped to launch the careers of Robert Lowell and other contemporaries, Jarrell taught for many years at the University of North Carolina, where he was much revered. He died in a car accident in 1965.

This Issue

March 25, 1965