The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
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The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarell is a short poem of five lines that was published in 1945. This was after the war, where Jarell also published the other two poetry books that showed his experience of the war. The poetry books were Little Friend, Little friend published in 1945, and Losses published in 1948. He was a veteran in the war and worked for the Army Air Corps as a control post operator working with bomber troops. He had, therefore, experienced war first hand and had seen the impacts of the war. He continued to play his role as a teacher and a poet. He was considered an outspoken critic, poet, and novelist and as one with sharp and robust insight, especially in poetry. The poem is about the death of a gunner during the world war two who died in a Sperry ball turret due to a bombing of an aircraft (Jarrell, 1945). The poem is written in the first person, and it gives Gunner, who is the deceased, a live voice. It is a very quiet but still moving poem as it delivers so much information in very few words.
The poem is a form of the author giving the summary of the war and the effects it had calmly and concisely. Jarell takes the reader through the conditions of a timeless existence where birth turns into death, and also, death becomes birth. The main theme of the poem is that of violence or war. He mainly creates a moral paradox; for instance, in the ‘they’ in the last, the poem seems insensitive and also makes the author look unsympathetic, but it is used to show their unnatural act given their abnormal situation is only appropriate(Jarrell, 1945). The author, therefore, mainly uses paradox to show how the convectional situations are correct since they are influenced by the unnatural condition that was created by the war.
Birth in the poem is also represented in terms of death; for instance, when the author says that the country has placed him in the secure womb of the “mother’s womb,” it shows how he dreads to go home and rest since he was fatigued by the battle. The birth of the Ball Turret Gunner is also reversed to death, as seen in the lines “Six miles from the earth” he is “loosed from its dream of life” whereby the birth in his state is death(Jarrell, 1945). The best imagery used to express the unnatural condition of the war is the image of Gunners’ “wet fur” as he froze when he was in the belly of the “state.” The fur represents the pile of his flight jacket that is soaked in the morning fog during the takeoff as the temperatures were very low. The lines must also make the reader imagine the situation in which a fetus in the mother’s womb goes through an “unnatural” regressive condition in which it is completely enclosed in down or “wet fur” (Meyers, 2019). The author, therefore, aims to show the violence and the horrible conditions in the war.
The war served as a call to defend Japanese poets, and the poems played a significant role in Japan’s war. The Tanka poems that were written during the world war two by Japanese poets surprised me as they consist of 31 words that are written in a single unbroken line (Brink, 2017). Most of these poems laid their emphasis on the experiences of war, and the one that stood out was by Sadako Kurihara as it described the whole atomic bombing showing the violence clearly and makes the reader feel as if they were also there when it happened due to the way imagery is used.
References
Brink, D. A. (2017). Japanese Poetry and its Publics: From Colonial Taiwan to Fukushima. Routledge.
Jarrell, R. (1945). The death of the ball turret gunner.
Meyers, J. (2019). The Tears of War: Jarrell, Dickey, Hecht. The Hopkins Review, 12(3), 409-421.