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From the sequence of events
in this poem, the life-span of the ball turret gunner
appears to be a matter of minutes. When his mother bore him,
he 'fell' out of one sleep and entered another. The second
sleep, named 'the State' resembles the prenatal condition
where he is not truly 'awake', is like an animal with
'wet fur', and is enclosed, as he is within the ball turret.
Suddenly, six miles up in the air, he
'comes to' and for the first time, is awake in a sky
that is full of death. This condition remains, presumably, until
the flak gets him. The impact of the last line of the poem
resembles that of a direct hit. The only rhyme in the poem is
in the fifth line, a quiet rhyme that goes back four lines.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
Randall Jarrell (1945)
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.
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