SOURCE: Quinn, Sister M. Bernetta. “Thematic Imagery in the Poetry of Randall Jarrell.” Southern Review 5, no. 4 (autumn 1969): 1226-35.

In the following essay, Quinn considers five images—dream, wish, child, mirror, and star—as they combine to give thematic unity to the lyrics of Jarrell's Complete Poems.

A luminous thread of related images fittingly binds together Randall Jarrell's final book of poems [The Complete Poems, by Randall Jarrell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.]: its title tends to suggest a closer unity than the usual word collected. Dream, wish, child, mirror, and star references occur consistently throughout. The wish motif, used almost fifty times, is an obvious consequence of the relationship between wishes and their fulfillment in dreams:

Look behind what you first see, the “manifest content,” Freud urged, and in the covered-up “latent content” you will always find a wish lurking.

(Richard L. Schoenwald, Freud The Man...