Randall Jarrell

There's a long tradition of war poems going back more than 2,500 years. In a sense, the Illiad was a war poem and not a very flattering one. Poems can praise war, condemn war or simply observe the reality of it. Randall Jarrell could be critical of war but not so much in the political sense but about the general concept; his poems understood the dark complexity. Having said that, here's something of a stark anti-war poem from World War Two which, once it started, was a war nearly impossible for most of the world to avoid. All over the world, millions volunteered to serve in World War II but it's important to remember that millions more were drafted into a fight they little understood. Most of the volunteers, and most of the draftees, served honorably insofar as they could within the context of the war, but the complexities remained.


The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother's sleep, I fell into the State,
and I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

—Randall Jarrell