VCCS Litonline Introduction to Literature
English 112 (English Composition II)
Page 9 of 9 pages |
VCCS Litonline Introduction to Literature |
Page 9 of 9 pages |
Summary
In this lesson, you should have come to realize that a great deal of interpretation can result even from rereading and discussing a brief poem like "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." Some idea of the conditions during World War II that prompted the poem should have added a lot to a literal view of the speaker's situation, as well as to assessing the tone of the poet, who served in the Eighth Air Force during that war. Hopefully, a closer look at the images and sounds of the poem suggested to you that you can recognize differences between older and more recent poems by the way the poets use sound and even the arrangement of lines on the page.
The only objective that
remains, then, is for you to decide what this poem says to you about life--maybe even your
life. You can jot notes below or access
the discussion forum to answer questions like those below. (Remember to copy and paste
the question and your response into a word processor before turning this page if you
respond below instead of going directly to the discussion forum for this poem.)
| Preparing to Join
an Academic Forum
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. |
You may have noticed that the questions in this lesson got somewhat harder--from prompting a literal understanding to reconsiderations of the poem's ideas and finally to rather philosophical questions. That's what you should expect from good literature--from good art in any medium.
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The URL for this page is: http://vccslitonline.vccs.edu/ReadingPoetry/summary.htm
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