"The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" (1955), a grim, brooding masterpiece, is the most quoted poem to come out of World War II. Enfolded in the plexiglass dome posed like a blister on the underside of a B-17 or B-24 bomber, the speaker is ripe for catastrophe. To intensify the image of doom, the poet robs the five-line poem of suspense by establishing in the title that the speaker does not survive the war. To enhance the stark terror of a gunner's task, Jarrell makes him soft and vulnerable, like a tender, unborn fetus. Swiveling like a latter-day watchman in the round, the gunner hunches in the turret to track the enemy below with .50-caliber machine-gun fire. The collar of his napped flight jacket freezes in the frigid air six miles up, where he meets the death-dealing black bursts that "loosed" him from a "dream of life," the poet's term for late-teen unsophistication and a forgivable idealism.
Jarrell's skill with imagery derives from incisive wordcraft. Within the brief poem are few rhymes: froze/hose as end links and "black flak" as an abrupt, cacophonous internal punch at the airman. The victim jolts awake from his youthful illusions to a "State" necessity — the waste of callow, expendable warriors. The unseen challengers are "nightmare fighters" who leave the shattered gunner in pitiable shape. The conclusion is sensational, ghoulish: Like a dismembered fetus, his remains are jet-washed from the turret with a steam hose. Without comment, the poet halts, leaving the reader with the inhuman remnants of air combat.
