Ball Turret Gunner

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner is a short five line poem in which a soldier in World War II has his plane shot down and falls to his eventual death. But there's more to this poem then meets the eye. The complexity of the poem is in the imaginary and figurative language. "The poem also deals with big issues like life's fragility, the inescapability of death, the power and role of the state in our lives and , of course, the horrors of war." This poem perfectly illustrates what poetry is capable of and how it forces us to read between the lines and find underlying meanings.

The major theme in The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner is obviously death. But the poem also has a lot to do with birth and war. The first line of the poem says, "From my mother's sleep I fell into the state." In my opinion the speaker knows that death is soon going to be inevitable. It's been said that when people are close to dying that they often think back to the beginning of life. As if they have finally come full circle and are accepting the fact the end is near. The second line, "and I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze" gives an example of a metaphor. The speaker is hunched in the belly of the Turret, like he was once hunched in the belly of his mother's stomach. The fur he speaks of is probably the fur on the jacket, which bombers would where in World War II and it was freezing because they had no heat in airplanes back then.

The narrator or speaker in this poem is through the voice of the dead turret shooter. In line three he says, "Six miles of earth, loosed from its dream of life." This is the first line in the poem where you can tell for sure the speaker is inside of a plane. The second part of the line however I believe is the most complex line in the poem. "Loosed from its dream of life." To me, this could either refer to the killing that is going on in the war around him or the