Mail Call By Randall Jarrell Essay Example

style="text-align: justify">Randall creates a depressing imagery of the soldiers, comparing them to stones and where they’ve been shot to a bird falling but then he says, “Surely the past from which the letters rise, is waiting in the future, past the graves? ” (3-4). throughout the poem, Randall uses words like “evade”, “graves”, “haunted”, all these words have a negative denotation but when he starts to talk the letters, he then uses the words, “future’, “dreams”, “wishes”. These words create a kind of positive atmosphere and show that the soldiers are looking forward to something, hoping for something.

They ate waiting, and the years contract to an empty hand, to one unuttered sound---” (9-10), here again in this line the word “waiting”, lets one know again that there some expectance. At the end of the tenth line, there a caesura and a caesura is a complete pause in a line of poetry or in a musical composition. So again, there goes that expectance, because they reader is pausing and waiting for the next line and that pause sort of creates the image of a soldier waiting for his name to be called and right after the caesura follows the next line “The soldier simply wishes for his name”.