War And The Death Of A Turret Gunner

Even if he was spared another gunner’s bullet at the end of the mission, he knew he was still not safe. In the case of a forced landing, he knew he would be sacrificed. On the third line - “Six miles from the earth, loosed from its dream of life” - one can observe his acknowledgment of this surreal reality. This leads the character to the understanding of not only his physical distance from earth, but also from earthly life and the odds against him going back to that life. He was already preparing himself for the worst and suppressing his hopes of survival.

In the middle of the poem, the speaker arrives at the number of casualties from the war. When he reads this number he can’t believe that he is still alive. As he reads down the names he uses the visual imagery and simile to describe how he expected to find his own name in “letters like smoke” (line 16). This helps the reader understand how lucky the speaker felt about somehow escaping the war still alive. As he goes

Death is something that everyone has to look forward to at some point in life, but one is temporarily alive by this idea of the “American dream” they are handed throughout a lifetime. It is not until many are faced with adversity that life is truly noticed. For the gunner this moment comes when he is “six miles from earth” facing enemies that he wakes up for the first time. He is awake due to this being the first time in his life that he is truly separated from that dream. Jarrell uses the second half of line three to describe this idea of the detachment from the normality of everyday life. Jarrell is saying that everyday life is just a dream and one is a zombie, dazed going through the motions of typical life. What Jarrell is saying here is that Americans are born dead due to the life they are brought up in and since they are dead do not get to experience real life. The ball turret gunner only truly “lives” for a little bit due to the changing consequences of war around him. Last line of the poem describes his actual death and how

To understand what a soldier goes through, Jerrell’s poem must be explored. His poem’s time era is important, it taking place during World War Two, because it was the most prominent war America has faced. The title alone tells the reader that someone has died. Immediately in the first line, Jerrell reveals the speaker of the poem is retelling his death story. In the first line, Jerrell talks about him being in his mother’s belly and then falling into the state. By his mother, he means the B-17 bomber. He has physically fallen asleep and reawakened in the turret’s chair. He could also be talking about the stages of his life. When he sleeps, he reminisces

First, the birth of the gunner. In the poem it says “From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State”(ln.1). In this line Jarrell is comparing the ball turret to a mother’s womb. Since of the awkward position of the turret on the plane the gunner had to sit in a fetal, so they could aim and shoot, but in the mother’s womb you have to sit in a fetal position in order to fit inside

The poem dramatizes details on how the colonel witnesses severe posttraumatic stress disorder when people witness severe tragic events. As a former colonel he has past events bothering him mentally. “The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house”(5-6). This statement shows how the speaker feels towards whats inside the house and a sense of despair and loneliness in the colonel persona. It could also mean how the colonel is interrogating someone how he killed him and hanged him from a thread on top of his house. The poem shows horrific imagery towards the reader “the broken bottles embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a mans leg or cut his hands to lace”(6-7). This statement ponders the reader on how vivid the speaker observes imagery of broken bottles embedded on the walls, this sentence is mentally alluding the reader to stay out of his property and keeping people away from his personal space. “on the television was a cop show. It was in english.(5). This sentence implies how the show was in english meaning that the other channels were not in english

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-Frogg 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

Paraphrase: The first stanza in about how someone or something was sleeping until it got very cold and froze to the outside. Then it's about how it was shot out of a plane way above the earth and it saw all the fighting in the sky. Lastly it talks about how it had to be washed out of the barrel of a gun as if it were a casing.

The poem could be interpreded as either fantasy or reality. The fantasy part being the world ending during wwII, and the reality part being that nothing in this life is permanent, eventually it all fades away.

This shows the soldier’s pain and suffering. “Floud’ring” gives the allusion that the soldier is struggling and is very clumsy. The use of “fire and lime” (12) gives an vivid image of the agony he is experiencing. The irony of the poem is seen in the last lines as he attacks those who argue that death in the war is honored, “my friend, you would not tell with such high zest” (Line 25).

“The poem’s opening lines drop readers into the middle of battle, using a quick, densely delivered series of images that pile onto each other like the burdens of the soldiers” (Jackson 170). We get images right away in the poem that we are experiencing heavy events that have happened in history, and Owen successfully takes us there. The first two lines of the poem start off with a simile, “bent double, like old beggars under sacks” (Owen l.1). There is a comparison between the soldiers that are in the war and old beggars under sacks, suggesting that the soldiers are weak and poor. With the whole first stanza, we can get a visual interpretation of soldiers that are viewed as “beggars,” “coughing hags,” “blind,” and “drunk with fatigue” (Owen l.1-7). “Drunk with fatigue” (Owen l.7), “exists on the boundary of conscious and unconscious” (Jackson 170) mind state. Giving us, as readers, a sense of how these soldiers were living and what they were going through by this gruesome description of this war. Later on in the poem, we see that “someone still was yelling out and stumbling, and flound’ring like a man in fire” (Owen l.11-12). The use of the simile in that line, gives us the image of how this man was stumbling, he was stumbling like someone trying to get out of a fire. We can see that in our minds as someone struggling, someone very

Stanza One of the poem uses depressing and pathetic language to convey an image of a ragged band of soldiers forging on through a torn-up battlefield. Owen describes the soldiers

It consists of four stanzas which are not equal lengthwise. There is also no rhyming; the poem has free verse. The speaker, who is also the main persona of the poem, is a soldier in the war and we deduce this from what he describes—which definitely sounds like a battlefield— and when he talks about “[their] camp” (5). The “blind man” described in line 13 and the “girl” in line 15 could be identified as silent personas. The poem’s historical context is the First World War, to which the poet, Isaac Rosenberg, was sent with the English Army. His experience was probably what inspired the poem’s theme. The audience of the poem is every reader, but it could also be a person close to the speaker. Rosenberg’s personal experience of the war, could also indicate that he is the speaker and that the poem could be considered autobiographical. Moreover, one could say that the poem looks like it could be en extract from a diary entry, or even a creative letter to a loved one. The tone of the poem is melancholic, sombre, serious and tense, but a little hopeful as well. Figurative language is excessively used in this poem. There are two similes, which facilitate the comparison of the song that “dropped” with “a blind man’s dream on the sand” (13) and with “a girl’s dark hair” (15). Metaphors are ample in the poem, for example when they are “dragging these anguished limbs” (4), the “poison-blasted track” (5), the fact that “death could drop from the dark” (10) and that “no ruin lies there” (15). In line 3 there is personification of the “sinister threat [that] lurks there” and the “[m]usic showering on [their] faces” (9). There could also be an allusion to the Bible, when the speaker uses the biblical terms “hark!” (7) and “[l]o!” (8), while the “strange joy” (7) described, could be considered an oxymoron. Interesting is also the wording of the poem. The speaker uses poetic language with some archaic elements, but also invents and

This poem utilizes rhyming couplets allowing readers to visualise a neat and formal setting. Futility of the war is also evident in this poem because it shows an incapable man fighting, and eventually dying a coward, leaving his mother all by herself back home. “Jack fell as he would have wished, the mother said” in this quote the mother uses a common euphemism for dying in war as ‘Jack fell’ this usually means an honourable soldier’s death, one who has fallen in action. The first and second stanza of this poem could in fact be a separate poem but in the third stanza it all comes out and shows that the Officer didn’t like Jack’s attitude and his cowardice throughout his short lived war experience. Another representation of futility is “He thought how ‘ Jack’, cold-footed, useless

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a large camp. Men and women suffering at the hands of these Nazi criminals. We closed in on the camp rifles raised, sweat pouring down our head. We got to the last woodline before the camp when we stopped.