[In the following review, Rich asserts that Dickey's poem "The Firebombing" "can be shown to implicate the reader in the blame for the firebombing of Japan during World War II."]

Jacques-Louis David originally displayed his painting The Sabines facing a cartouched oval mirror. When patrons turned their backs to the painting to look into the mirror, they saw themselves flattened two-dimensionally into the midst of the battle of the Sabines against the Romans—either imprinted over the central figure of the woman with arms outstretched as if on a crucifix, or standing under her arms, as if under protective wings. With a slight shift, the viewer became imprinted over the figure of the naked invading Roman who has his back to us, a round shield covering him. David's unusual orchestration made a political statement at the time of the French Revolution: We are all involved and implicated in the struggle over freedom. The spectator may turn a back to it only to find herself or himself more fully reflected in it.

What David did with The Sabines, James Dickey does with his perhaps most controversial poem "The Firebombing." This poem, written sympathetically from the point of view of an ex-bomber pilot in World War II, has been described by Robert Bly as "gloating over power over others." He calls Dickey a "Georgia Cracker Kipling" for writing what Bly characterizes as "new critical brainwashing that doesn't wash." But "The Firebombing" can be shown to implicate the reader in the blame for the firebombing of Japan during World War II. Bearing out the experiences of many war veterans, this reading is sound on several levels. First, politically, by sanctioning a government that, in war, sends people into battle, Americans sanction the bloodshed that ensues. Soldiers follow orders that are, "on behalf of the American people." Second, psychologically, when the weight of guilt is too hard to bear, we pass it on to others to share it with us. Dickey, through the mirror of his craft, deftly reflects back into the picture those of us who deny complicity and disagree with the poem's message.

The poem begins with a rousing imperative, much like a pep talk given by a sergeant to his soldiers: "Homeowners unite"—a one-line, two-word stanza that looms larger because of the frame of white space around it. Dickey uses five of these one-line stanzas in the first three pages, and then, just when we become accustomed to them, stops. His stanzas vary in length, organization, and line length. Sometimes he begins the next line at the visual point where the previous line ends. We feel dropped. All this variation is unsettling, inviting us to grasp onto some comforting structure, impose it ourselves, just as a government imposes orders onto its military in the chaos of battle.

Unsettling, as well, is his shift to triple spacing between words, dividing verbs from adverbs, prepositions from their objects, verbs from their objects, nouns from their verbs. This invites the reader to try, albeit unconsciously, to pull the words back to comfortable regularity, thus including the reader in the shaping of the words on the page and, by implication, closing the distance between us as passive listeners and the speaker as active creator. In some places this spacing invites us to punctuate, as for example in these lines:

     Grocery baskets  toy fire engines
     New Buicks stalled by the half-moon
     Shining at midnight on crossroads  green paint
     Of jolly garden tools  red Christmas ribbons:

This invitation to punctuate is a haunting move, for dropping punctuation into written discourse as an afterthought, done by someone other than the author, is visually, and metaphorically, like dropping bombs into a landscape.

Dickey further unsettles us with stutterings:

     In a dark dream  that  that is
     That is like flying inside someone's head
     Think of this  this of this
     ............
     Letting go  letting go

As with any stutterer, we are tempted to say it for him just to stop the halting, get closure, be finished with it. And so we are drawn into the bombing, for these lines stutter the way a machine gun would. We want the words to empty out, the bombs to leave the bomb bay. With these and other unsettling moves Dickey makes us vulnerable, forcing us to look for some structure into which we can settle.

Dickey also draws us in with patterns such as anagramatic alliteration. For example, he often starts a series of lines with the same letters, as in stanza 3:

      There are cowl flaps …
      The shovel-marked …
      The enemy …

or later:

      Forever I do sleep …
      For home that breaks …
      From my wingtips …

Even his capitalization of first words offers the safety of return, and so we grab for the next line, and the next line, and are driven along to read more of the bomber's rapturous ode. Then there are visual and aural alliterations that link words in lines and across lines: the b's in,

      Break under the first bomb, around those
      In bed, or late in public baths …

and the look and sound of c's in,

      Of Chicago fire:
      Come up with the carp pond showing …

Whitmanesque catalogues of the landscape viewed from the cockpit name the elements of what is being bombed, like Adam's first naming and thus making conscious the parts of Paradise. We are drawn to this voice by its exuberance and power. We want to be part of a power that is not affected by moral strictures that seem, like the Japanese villages seen from the distance of an airplane, mere abstractions.

It would be easy for us to blame the pilot-speaker, to unburden ourselves of the guilt of having enjoyed this poem and of feeling the power of destruction. But there is the "Catch 22": If we blame the firebomber, we destroy what we have co-created, and if we do not, then we are co-pilots and guilty as well.

Dickey begins "The Firebombing" with an epigram taken from the Book of Job, "Or hast thou an arm like God?" Dickey offers us two alternatives: to be blameworthy by blaming the firebomber for his lack of guilt, or to be forgiven by forgiving: to damn like the devil, or to forgive with the sweep of God's arm, and thus, like David's spectator, become the Christlike Sabine with outstretched arms—the one taken in violence.