"Analysis of a Theme" "Argument"

“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” -Randall Jarrell

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.

NOTE: “A ball turret was a plexiglass sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24,

and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine-guns and one man, a short small man. When

this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he

revolved with the turret; hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the

foetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing

explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose” (author’s note). The Norton Anthology of

Modern Poetry, Second Edition, 902