The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell was another short poem, but one that I actually really liked.  It is about the death of a gunner on a WWII American bomber aircraft.  In class, we talked about how the majority of the men who flew in these aircrafts did not make it out alive, and the outcome in this poem was no different.  A lot of the men who fought in WWII were very young, and so I believe that the first line “From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,” is referencing that and talking about how fearful those young men must have been.  The last line is also particularly sad: “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.”  To go out that way must have been absolutely horrifying.