Responses to Questions in “Understanding Poetry”


Read  the poem from your textbook or go back to your browser and click on the 
airplane in the top right corner of any instructional page so that an online copy of 
the poem will pop up.  Use as much space as you need by putting your answers 
between the questions below that were copied from the website.

From Page 3: Answer the questions below to type your first impressions of the 
poem, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." 

3.1 What's going on in the poem? 

3.2 What era in history is depicted? 

3.3 Who's speaking in the poem? 

3.4 What is the speaker's condition? Why? 

3.5 How are readers supposed to feel about the speaker and the speaker's situation?
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4.1 Based on your reading of page 3 of the website and your own experience, what 
do readers generally learn from a first reading of a poem.

4.2 What could readers gain from re-reading a poem like "The Death  of the Ball 
Turret Gunner"? List as many valid ideas as you can.
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6.1 List features of closed and open forms of poems that you see in “The Death of 
the Ball Turret Gunner.”
6.2  "Mother's sleep" is a phrase that should cause questions--

7.1 Is his mother dreaming about him? 

7.2 Is he daydreaming about home and mother? 

7.3 Was he sleeping and dreaming of home? 

Another phrase that bears a closer look is "fell into the State." It might also
cause questions-- 
7.4 Why is "State" capitalized? Does it mean his nation? 

7.5 In what sense did he "fall into" his situation? Did he enlist or get drafted? If
he enlisted, did he have any idea what he was getting in to?

Still another phrase that stands out as odd, or "figurative language," is about
waking up to "nightmare fighters." 
7.6 Is he asleep dreaming of war? 

7.7 Are the fighter planes nightmarish because they aren't what he expected?
Or is it because he's so vulnerable in the turret?
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8.1 Why is the tone of that last line so cold? 

8.2 Are we readers supposed to feel sympathetic to the speaker who has died in war?

8.3 Given the use of words like "mother" and "belly" and "died" and "washed 
out," is it too far fetched to believe that the poet wants us to view war as a kind of 
abortion and those who die in wars as helpless victims?
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9.1 Maybe war is worse than the "hell" to which it has been compared. Maybe the 
wars of the Twentieth Century suggest that the world is indifferent to us, to our 
death. Respond from the context of this poem or from your own perspective. Does 
indifference rule?

9.2 Alan Williamson suggests in "Jarrell, the Mother, the Marchen" (Twentieth 
Century Literature, Fall, 1994 [40.3]: 283-300) that if the ball turret on the plane is 
a womb image then maybe the reference to "earth" and its "dream of life" from 
which we awake to our mortality is also a kind of womb image--but the separation 
from this womb is destructive, not a birthing.  So maybe war and technology are not 
the only death dealers. Maybe life on earth is a death for which we feel grief and 
anger. Respond from the perspective of the poem or base your response on your 
own observations of life.