Warm-Up 3/20/08

A.

• fighting, death, black, dark, loud, piercing,
• gun, shooting, killing, injuring, blood, red, fighting, enemy, trained to kill
• kill, hurt, win, conquer, take over, fight, charge, dominate

I don't imagine all war images to be of the Iraq war, I also think of movies and the poems read last night.

B. The strongest associations I have with WW2 are movies that I have seen that have to do with WW2. I also think of the Holocaust and Pearl Harbor. When I imagine WW2, I usually imagine it taking place mostly in Europe, not America. I view it as a time of death and destruction.

• The difference that I now see in the poem is that the belly is the turret. The poem makes more sense now that I know that a soldier would literally have to hunch in the turret for hours in the cold. Also, he can easily look down at the earth and the bombs that the plane is dropping down. I think the last line just means that he feels unimportant in his small turret while everyone else is in the plane, so when he dies, they just wash him out without giving much thought to it. I think that the reason that Randall Jarrell wrote this depressing poem is because he wanted to fly in the Army but failed the tests and didn't qualify. This would give him negative thoughts about flying in war. He probably thought about flying often because it was something that he was not allowed to do and he wanted to do it. Now that I know all of this information, it is much easier to interpret this poem and if I were to analyze it now, I would have a lot more to say about it and I would have a lot more insight. The information about what a turret is and the videos showing what it would be like inside one help a lot as well as the background information on the author.