The Dark Side of the Wild Blue Yonder

Here are two poems, both written by 20th-century male American poets about airborne warfare in World War II. But despite those two sets of similar circumstances, the poems themselves are world apart, both in their recognition and their characteristics. 

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

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. 

The War in the Air 

Howard Nemerov

For a saving grace, we didn't see our dead,
Who rarely bothered coming home to die
But simply stayed away out there
In the clean war, the war in the air.


Seldom the ghosts come back bearing their tales
Of hitting the earth, the incompressible sea, 
But stayed up there in the relative wind,
Shades fading in the mind,


Who had no graves but only epitaphs
Where never so many spoke for never so few:
Per ardua, said the partisans of Mars,
Per aspera, to the stars.


That was the good war, the war we won
As if there was no death, for goodness's sake. 
With the help of the losers we left out there
In the air, in the empty air.






Although they both served in the Air Force, Nemerov was actually a pilot while Jarrell was a "celestial navigation tower operator," a title he considered the most poetic of all those in the military. Odd, then, that Jarrell's is the more graphic and the more sense-based poem, while Nemerov's is oddly detached and unsepcific.


Personally, I love both poems. Certainly, the first is better known, taught in high schools all over the country, where girls tend to be repulsed by the imagery while boys are gripped by the gore and testosterone. (Although high school guys tend to forget that the actual experiences are far more "Five O'Clock High" than "Top Gun.")


I enjoy the terse, cynical force of the "Ball Turret Gunner" and the aloof, delicate remoteness of "The War in the Air." I appreciate that both poets could approach the same subject and find some truth and humanity in the horror, while finding such diametrically opposed means to the same end.