jay@umd5.UUCP (11/08/85)
There has been so much throughout the net lately dealing with the Amazing Stories Episode of November 3 that I thought I'd share a more concise, more realistic, and just as amazing story as told by Randall Jarrell in a five line poem (if only Mr. Spielberg could be as concise): The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. -- Jay Elvove ..!seismo!rlgvax!cvl!umd5!jay c/o Systems, Computer Science Center, U. of MD.
jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos) (11/15/85)
[The referenced article is on "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner", by
Randall Jarrell.]
If it is socially unacceptable to discuss poetry in net.poems, please stop
your ears and shut your eyes while I tell you what I think of this poet.
This poem by Jarrell is his most often-anthologized, I think, yet it's too
short to get a real feel for the intensity of Jarrell's poetry. If you
liked this poem, read, for example, "The Woman at the Washington Zoo."*
The passage that goes something like [from memory, so it is probably
wrong]
Vulture, when you come for
The white rat the foxes left,
Take off the red helmet of your head
And step to me as Man,
The wild brother at whose feet
The white wolf fawns,
To whose hand of power
The great lioness stalks, purring.
You know what I was;
You see what I am.
Change me! Change me!
has always seemed to me to be one of the most intensely painful,
despairing, and poignant passages in any poem I have read, describing at
the same time the agony of personal rejection, the isolation inherent in
the depersonalization of the most personal of pursuits, and the failure of
mankind to achieve fully his potential to rise to the metaphysical and
thus transcend the animals. Simultaneously, it captures something
essential in Jarrell's poetry, something having to do with the inner
conflict that seemed to drive a lot of his poems. Notice how the acutely
pointed and self-critical "The white rat the foxes left" bears in it this
inner conflict, by virtue of the unusual use of the word "foxes".
"These beings, trapped as I am trapped,
but not themselves the trap..."
This is very good poetry.
---
* If you happened to take the English AP test in the Spring of 1975, you
encountered this poem there.
--
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