"Gunner," by Randall Jarrell is about a man who is drafted
into the air force and is sent to many different places.
He eventually crashes in the sea and dies. After he dies,
he is confused, and worried about his wife. I chose this poem because it was interesting and accurately described all the different places that you could be sent to while serving in the
war.
Gunner
By Randall Jarrell
Did they send me away from my cat and my wife
To a doctor who poked me and counted my teeth,
To a line on a plain, to a stove in a tent?
Did I nod in the flies of the schools?
And the fighters rolled into the tracer like rabbits,
The blood froze over my splints like a scab --
Did I snore, all still and grey in the turret,
Till the palms rose out of the sea with my death?
And the world ends here, in the sand of a grave,
All my wars over? How easy it was to die!
Has my wife a pension of so many mice?
Did the medals go home to my cat?
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Analysis of "Losses" By: Diana Woodall In "Losses," by Randall Jarrell, the poet put himself in the place of different soldiers during air combat, using metaphors to explain how each soldier died. In the poem, there are many different points of views of all the different pilots who fought during the second world war. Jarrell described the men who died before they ever fought a battle, and others who died because of mistakes and crashes. "We died on the wrong page of the almanac/ Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;/ Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend." This quote is an example of one of the men who died because of minor miscalculations, and another man who died in a routine crash. The first metaphor used describes the men who die because they miscalculated the angle of flight and died in the wrong country or crashed on top of mountains. The second metaphor describes men who accidentally crashed on hay stacks, before they ever got a chance to fight in the war. At the end of the poem, these same men are asking the unanswerable question, "Why did I die?" All of the men that Jarrell described in this poem have innocently died without a purpose, and are asking why. By taking on the role of innocent soldiers, Jarrell is able expand on the larger meaning of the poem: life and death.
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The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
By 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.
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Losses By: Randall Jarrell
It was not dying: everybody died. It was not dying: we had died before In the routine crashes-- and our fields Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks, And the rates rose, all because of us. We died on the wrong page of the almanac, Scattered on mountains fifty miles away; Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend, We blazed up on the lines we never saw. We died like aunts or pets or foreigners. (When we left high school nothing else had died For us to figure we had died like.) In our new planes, with our new crews, we bombed The ranges by the desert or the shore, Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores-- And turned into replacements and woke up One morning, over England, operational. It wasn't different: but if we died It was not an accident but a mistake (But an easy one for anyone to make.) We read our mail and counted up our missions-- In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school-- Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among The people we had killed and never seen. When we lasted long enough they gave us medals; When we died they said, "Our casualties were low." They said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities. It was not dying --no, not ever dying; But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead, And the cities said to me: "Why are you dying? We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?"
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