"Protocols," the second poem stemming from this [ballad] tradition, which also appears in Little Friend, Little Friend uses a more naturalistic approach to the same theme. The entire collection of poems involves the slaughter of innocents in warfare, both those who are actual children and those "infants" who are sent to fight. This poem has a specific setting, the extermination camp at Birkenau, Odessa, where the gas chambers were disguised as shower rooms and where smoking chimneys efficiently completed the task of mass murder. It is an almost unbearable poem, in which the children's innocent remarks clash with the mother's composed replies. Two children take part in the dialogue, in turn reporting the words of the mother one to another. Here Jarrell again employs italics to differentiate between the two speakers:

[. . . .]

Again, as in both the ballad and the Jarrellian tradition, the speakers are gradually shown to be dead victims. The children never knew that they were to die, and after their deaths they have no understanding of either death or the diabolical forces that cut off their lives. Death to them seems as natural as being bathed and put to sleep:

And I was tired and fell in in my sleep

And the water drank me. That is what I think.

And I said to my mother, "Now I'm washed and dried,"

My mother hugged me, and it smelled like hay

And that is how you die. And that is how you die.

 

As the reader stands along with the poet apart from the children in their innocence, the distance between that innocence and full knowledge is transmitted with the bitterest of irony. And if "Protocols" is not entirely successful, the reason may lie once again in the weakness of its closure. There is no particular advantage in having each child say the same phrase at the end; in fact, the speakers are poorly differentiated throughout the poem, having no individual point of view or separate identity. Unlike "Mother, Said the Child," there are no unexpected replies in "Protocols." The speakers mirror one another, producing a static effect and a shadowy sense of character. The strength of the poem lies in its specificity of time and place. What might have once seemed a limitation becomes a gain as the theme of the Holocaust grows in historical and literary importance. The drama in the poem is not in its characterization but rather in the sick horror of its implied action.