Many of the great poems we read today were written in times of great distress. One of these writers was Randall Jarrell. After being born on May 6, 1914, in Nashville Tennessee, Jarrell and his parents moved to Los Angeles where his dad worked as a photographer. When Mr. and Mrs. Jarrell divorced, Randall and his younger brother returned to Nashville to live with their mother.
While in Nashville, Randall attended Hume-Frog high school. Randall showed his love for the arts while in high school by participating in dramatics and journalism. Jarrell continued his career in the arts when he wrote and edited for Vanderbilt’s humor magazine, The Vanderbilt Masquerader. After earning his graduate degree at Vanderbilt, Jarrell accepted a teaching job at the University of Texas. While teaching at Texas, Jarrell met his future wife, Mackie Langham, a fellow English teacher.
In 1942, Jarrell left home to join the Army Air Corps as a flying cadet. At about this same time, Randall’s first book of poetry was being published. When Jarrell wrote home, his family often said his letters were, “confined and dreary.” When Jarrell could not quite cut it as a cadet, he switched to being a navigation control tower operator. As a control tower operator, Randall began to write about the pilots, navigators and gunners of the war. This is probably when Jarrell wrote one of his most famous poems, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” After being discharged from the army, Randall went back to teaching. Randall’s love for teaching showed by his famous quote, “if I were a rich man, I would pay money to teach.” Randall did have some psychiatric problems though.
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Many people thought Jarrell committed suicide when he was hit by a car on a dark road in 1965. People assumed suicide because at the time of his death Randall was in treatment for slitting his wrists in an attempt to kill himself. Most of Randall’s poetry reflects what he saw and experienced during the war. The structure that Jarrell uses in his poem, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” is quite unique. This poem consists of five uneven verses. All of these verses are combined into one stanza.
The metric pattern in this poem is very hard to detect. All of the lines begin with at least two anapestic feet followed by at least one iambic foot. This poem is not long enough to have a rhyme scheme even though the second and the fifth line have end rhyme. It is absolutely amazing how Jarrell gives us so many images in only a few short verses. Jarrell uses a great deal of imagery in this poem to help the reader get a better picture of what is going on. In the first line of the poem Jarrell uses visual, auditory and tactile imagery.
When he uses the words, “mother’s sleep,” the reader can see the mother laying in her bed sound asleep. Also the reader can hear the deep breaths that the mother is taking while she slumbers. The reader gets the tactile image when the author says, “I fell,” because almost everyone has experienced the falling sensation before. Since the word, “State,” is capitalized one can see that Jarrell is talking about some form of government. The reader gets the visual image of a government sitting around planning something big. In the second line of the poem, “And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze,” the reader gets visual, tactile and thermal imagery.
First of all the reader can see a person hunched, with his knees almost at his chest, in the belly of something. Also the reader can see a person with a fur coat that is almost covered in ice. The thermal imagery comes in when Jarrell says the word, “froze.” The reader can feel the cold coming from the frozen jacket as he reads the poem. When Jarrell says the words, “hunched in the belly,” the reader gets a very uncomfortable feeling. In line number three the reader gets visual imagery as well as slight tactile imagery. The visual imagery comes when Jarrell says, “Six miles from earth.” The reader gets a clear image of something being very high above the ground.
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When the author says, “loosed from the dream of life,” the reader gets a slight feeling of death or a vision of someone dying. The fourth line, “I woke to the black flak and the nightmare fighters,” brings the reader visual, auditory and tactile imagery. The reader can picture someone waking up to shrapnel, from an exploding bomb, flying by their head. One can hear the gunfire of the, “nightmare fighters,” along with the exploding shells.
The reader also gets a tactile image when the author says, “I woke up,” because everyone knows what it is like to wake up from a sleep. In the fifth and final line the reader gets a very graphic visual image. The reader can picture someone’s body being so destroyed that instead of removing the body from the turret the soldiers must wash it out with a hose. Jarrell also used a great deal of figurative language in this poem. The entire poem is an extended metaphor. This poem compares the struggles of war with the struggles of being born.
More specifically, it compares being killed the belly of a plane and being killed in the womb of a mother. We see this comparison many times throughout the poem. The first sign of this comparison is when we hear Jarrell use the word mother. He compares the womb, as a safe haven for a baby, to the gunner before the war. The gunner had no choice to go to war just like the baby had no choice in becoming a fetus. In the second line when Jarrell says, “hunched in its belly,” it is a very distinct comparison.
He is comparing a baby hunched in it’s mother’s whom and a gunner hunched in the belly of a plane. When, in the third line, Jarrell says, “loosed from the dreams of life,” we see a baby getting killed while in its mother’s womb. Finally, in the last line, when the author says, “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose,” there is another very distinct comparison between abortion and a gunner being killed in the belly of a plane. During an abortion, after the baby has been killed in the womb, the doctors, “wash” the dead fetus out of the mother with a hose. In the first part of the fourth line of this poem when Jarrell writes, “I woke to the black flak,” the reader heres the alliteration of the, “ck,” sound. With the repetition of this sound the reader can almost hear gunfire.
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Although there is no rhyme scheme to this poem, end rhyme takes place at the end of the first and fifth lines. The last thing one would analyze when explicating this poem would be the theme. Analyzing the theme of a poem consists of two things. First one would have to look at the topic of the poem. In this poem the topic is obviously the gunner getting drafted, the horrifying experiences of the gunner, and the death of the gunner. The second thing one would have to look at would be how the author feels about the topic.
In this poem the author obviously feels that life is a very fragile thing. Whether you are a baby in your mother’s womb or you are a gunner in the belly of a bomber, Jarrell shows us just how fragile life is and how easily it can be taken away.
