The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Randall Jarrell
- First Published: 1945
- Type of Work: Narrative
- Genres: Poetry
The Poem
A gem of a small poem, Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is often used in classrooms to exemplify the sustained metaphor. One of the poems based on Jarrell’s own experience in World War II, this tiny poem presents a layered message about the waste of war. The five-line highly compressed poem is as deliberately claustrophobic as the setting, the ball turret of a war plane. The brief first-person narrative describes how the young man fell “from [his] mother’s sleep” into the state, which confined him to the ball turret, another womb,...
[The entire page is 1376 words long]
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