A Toad's Favo(u)rite: The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

Peggy Goetz here to share a poem with you all. I have so enjoyed learning about poetry from all of you!

Picking my favorite anything has always been a problem for me so I get around that by saying “one of my favorites.” Also I am not sure it is really a favorite as much as one that had an impact on me.

My history with poetry is rather thin compared to many. From my early years I remember my parents reading “A Child’s Garden of Verses” with the counterpane and the birdie with the yellow bill. Later I recall my dad liking to give dramatic readings to us (a captive audience) of poems like “The Ancient Mariner,” “Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree,” and “The Raven.”

I don’t recall any of my teachers being brave enough to try to teach us poetry even through high school.

My first year at university, however, I took a class called 20^th Century Poetry. And it was the first time poetry really made an impression on me. I still found it all rather mysterious, but I did get a glimpse nonetheless.

(If you had told me then I might ever write poetry of any kind, I would have laughed at you. But that was long ago now.)

There are several poems from that time that somehow stuck with me. Since someone else will probably pick “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost and ee cummings might seem obvious, I will share the first poem that I remember having a heavy meaning that made a strong impression on me.

It is short, which I like. It is also stark and unflinching. 
  

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

  by Randall Jarrell

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 from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

                                                                                                                           See more HERE

The poem was published in 1945 and is about the death of a gunner on a World War II American bomber.

Jarrell gave this explanation, according to Wikipedia:

"A ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upsidedown in his little sphere. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose."

Reviewers at the time called the theme of the the poem a condemnation of the dehumanizing power of the State, graphically illustrated by the violence of war. 

The poem makes a clear, strong statement despite its brevity.  It is not one I would want to hang on my living room wall or recite for the beauty of its language, but it is one of the poems that had a strong impact on my young mind.