The Death Of The Ball Turret Gunner

The Death Of The Ball Turret Gunner: analysis

Introduction

The Death Of The Ball Turret Gunner is a five-line poem by Randall Jarrell, spoken by a dead airman. A ball turret is a gun position on the underside of a warplane, cramped enough that its gunner crouches inside. The speaker tells his whole existence in five lines. He passes from his mother's care to the State's, wakes in the sky to gunfire, and dies.

The poem compresses birth and death into one movement. It sets the warm image of the womb against the cold machinery of war. Its last line, about the hose, is the bluntest moment in the poem.

Summary

Line 1 opens with a fall. The speaker says, "From my mother's sleep I fell into the State." He has passed straight from his mother's keeping into the keeping of the State.

Line 2 places him inside the State's "belly." He hunches there until his "wet fur froze." The position is cramped and the cold is extreme.

Line 3 gives his height: "Six miles from earth." He is "loosed from its dream of life." The phrase leaves open whose dream it was, the earth's or the State's.

Line 4 brings the waking. He wakes "to black flak and the nightmare fighters." Explosions from anti-aircraft fire and attacking planes surround him. This is the only action in the poem.

Line 5 is the end. "When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose." The speaker reports his own death and the cleaning of his remains in one plain sentence. Nothing follows it.

Themes and meaning

The central theme is the individual consumed by the State. The capital S makes the State a power, almost a person. The speaker falls into it as a baby falls into the world. It holds him in its "belly," uses him, and disposes of him with a hose. He never chooses anything in the poem, and things are only done to him.

A second theme is birth turned into death. The poem borrows the language of the womb: sleep, a belly, hunching, wet fur. These details recall an unborn child curled in the dark. But this second womb delivers him only to death. The final washing out can be read as a grim parody of birth.

A third theme is waking as horror. The speaker moves from "sleep" and a "dream of life" to a "nightmare." Ordinarily, waking ends a nightmare. Here waking begins one. Life before the war seems like a dream, and war is the reality that kills.

A fourth theme is the indifference of the machine. The anonymous "they" of line 5 clean the turret as a routine job. The speaker's death matters only as a mess to be removed. The flat statement makes the waste of a life more shocking than any lament could.

Tone

The tone is flat, detached and bitter. The dead speaker does not mourn himself or protest. He reports facts in short declarative clauses.

The first four lines carry some dreamlike strangeness, in "my mother's sleep" and "dream of life." Line 4 grows harsher, with the hard sounds of "black flak." The last line drops all imagery for a bare report.

That last line is the poem's coldest moment. The words "washed me out" treat a person as dirt. The calm voice makes the horror greater, because the speaker seems to accept the indifference that destroyed him.

Form and structure

The poem is a single stanza of five lines. Lines run from 10 to 14 syllables, with no regular metre. The rhythm is loose, roughly four to six beats a line. The final line is the longest, which gives it a heavy, drawn-out fall.

The form facts give the rhyme scheme ABCDB. The only rhyme links "froze" in line 2 and "hose" in line 5. That rhyme ties the gunner's cold, cramped life to his disposal. Every line is end-stopped, so each stage of his existence stands alone.

Poetic devices

Metaphor line 1

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State Birth becomes a fall from maternal safety into the power of the State. A whole upbringing is skipped in one movement.

Personification line 1

the State The capital letter turns the government into a single, almost living power that claims the speaker.

Metaphor line 2

I hunched in its belly The turret becomes the State's belly, like a womb. The speaker crouches inside like an unborn child.

Imagery line 2

my wet fur froze The wet fur can be read as the fur of a flight jacket or as the damp of a newborn animal. It makes the speaker seem young and vulnerable.

Ambiguity line 3

loosed from its dream of life Its may refer to the earth or to the State. Either way, ordinary life is recast as a dream he leaves behind.

Consonance line 4

black flak The hard k sounds and short vowels imitate the sharp bursts of anti-aircraft fire.

Paradox line 4

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters Waking should end a nightmare. Here it begins one, reversing sleep and reality.

Understatement line 5

they washed me out of the turret with a hose The death is reported as a cleaning chore. The flat wording exposes the indifference of war to the individual.

Rhyme line 5

hose It rhymes with froze in line 2, the only rhyme in the poem. The sound closes the poem with a cold finality.

Words worth knowing

turret

A small rotating gun position on the underside of a warplane. The gunner crouched inside it.

flak

Fire from anti-aircraft guns, or the bursting shells themselves.

fighters

Fighter planes that attack bombers. They are not people fighting.

the State

The nation as a governing power. The capital letter gives it the force of a single being.

What readers have said

• T E H reads the gunner as a metaphor for a baby in the womb and links the brutal death to abortion. T E H, 2005
• Julia rejects that reading and says the poem shows only how precarious and exposed the gunner's position was. Julia, 2005
• Todd argues the poem can hold both the womb and the chaos of war, since the reader's interpretation completes it. Todd, 2005
• Nathan reads the capital-S State as the true cause of the death, a power that takes people, uses them and discards them. Nathan, 2008
• David Sullivan, who says he served as an aerial gunner, takes the poem as an image of the horror and senselessness of war. David Sullivan, 2006
• Matt cites what he says is the poet's own note, comparing the hunched gunner in his revolving sphere to a foetus in the womb. Matt, 2007