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 rom its dream of life.
I woke to the black flak
and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed
me out of the turret with a hose.
"The Death of the Ball Turret
Gunner" by Randall Jarrell is a poem about
a soldier dying
in the ball turret of a fighter plane during
what was most
likely World War
II. The poem tells of the fear of young
soldiers being sent
to war and their
thoughts of dying.
The poem is told from the point of view of
a young fighter aboard a
bomber during
World War II. The fighter is positioned
in the ball turret
which was an
enclosed bubble with a swivel gun in the belly of the plane.
This poem reads like a nightmare or dream
being told by a soldier
who has been
taken from his childhood and thrown into war.
The soldier
describes the
fear of awakening from the naive state of childhood into the
preeminent
likelihood of his death during the "State" of war (line 1). He
describes the
disconnection he feels from Earth and what he calls it "dream
of life" as
if life only existed in birth and death (line 3). When he awakens
to "black
flak" and "nighmare fighters" he seems to imply that all that
lies
between birth and
death is war (line 4).
The theme to this poem emerges in the last
line with almost a plea that
he not be
forgotten. When he says "they
washed me out of the turret with
a hose" he
implies that there is nothing left including the memory of him and
the war goes on.
Moss 3
Works Cited
Jarrell,
Randall. "The Death of the Ball
Turret Gunner." The Harper
American Literature. Ed.
Donald McQuade. New York: Harper
Collins , 1996. 2594.
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