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DANIKA MYERS ON CONSTRUCTION OF MASCULINITY IN POEMS BY
EDMUND
BLUNDEN & RANDALL JARRELL
...Simon Featherstone’s discussion of gender also spends a
lot
of time on masculinity as it is constructed, deconstructed, and
reconstructed
by war poems. He is particularly interested in the utopian
recasting
of masculine values, whether homoerotic or otherwise, in poems that are
ostensibly
“anti-war.” Briefly summarize Featherstone’s development of these
ideas,
then choose one poem from each war and discuss their constructions of
manhood
and masculinity.
Featherstone argues that male war poetry from both the First and
Second
World Wars questions the alliance between militarist values and
masculinity,
though in the First World War this is revealed through sensual or
homoerotic
representations of masculinity, while in the Second World War it
appears
as a questioning of militarist heroic ideals.
Featherstone shows the redefinition of masculine
relationships
by First World War poets through a sensual, sometimes homoerotic,
language
applied to the militarist values of bravery and fellowship. This
language
moves ideas of community, intimacy, and caring from the realm of
heterosexual
relationships to the realm of masculine relationships formed in
combat.
Male war poets of the First World War use this new language to present
emerging
male relationships as not only intense, but also as strikingly utopian
in
contrast with the dystopia of battle: supportive, gentle, and
loving,
rather than destructive, violent, and unfeeling. By emphasizing
certain
existing militarist values—comradeship, loyalty—the military power
structure
is subverted, coming to celebrate emotional complexity and
self-reliance
over stoic heroism and blind obedience. Because it celebrates the
intense
(and intensely masculine) relationships which result from the
extraordinary
experience of war, this poetry cannot be unequivocally anti-war, and
male
war poets writing in response to the First World War often include some
level
of nostalgia which is not anti-war sentiment, but rather an attempt to
find
language which can express the extraordinary experience of war and the
loss
of heterosexual self-identification.
Featherstone admits that male war poets of the
Second
World War rarely use the language of homoeroticism which arose from the
First
World War, but he argues that these poets’ representations of
masculinity
remain complex, moving from empathy and protest towards a questioning
of
heroic ideals. He shows the development of heroes who are neither
sexually
attractive nor linked to public patriotism, and who triumph through
endurance
rather than bravery; this causes traditional masculine constructs of
heroism
to become blurred and unsettling. Featherstone cites war poetry which
observes
combat while refraining from any valuative response, giving analytical
descriptions
of killing without empathy for the dead. This analytical style is
fascinated
with traditional male power structures and the effect of war on
combatants,
but does not revert to pre-war militarist ideals. It celebrates
symbols
of traditional heroism, but surrounds celebration with irony and
frustration,
and it distances itself from moral responsibility, forcing the reader
to
form a personal moral response. As the male First World War poets
went
beyond ideals of sacrifice and honor to empathize with combatants,
offering
the sensual community of men as an antidote to the dehumanization of
war,
the male Second World War poets supercede “pity and protest” to analyze
war
without making explicit judgments. This language ultimately
denies
its apparent callousness by a self-conscious need for analysis and ways
to
conceptualize the dead. It acknowledges the militarist ideals of
sportsmen,
the male power of the killer, but also goes against militarist ideals
to
reveal the vulnerability of these figures.
Though Second World War poets move away from the utopian ideals which
First
World War poets showed in sensual male communities, Featherstone
concludes
that they are similarly ambivalent about war and do not revert to
traditional
ideals of heroism, using heroism as a means of re-examining rather than
reinforcing
ideals.
Edmund Blunden’s poem “Preparations for Victory,” (see p.11 of this
exam)
from the First World War and Randall Jarrell’s poem, “The Lines,” (see
p.12
of this exam) from the Second World War both question militarist values
and
construct masculinity, but, more than this, they demonstrate the way in
which
war erases masculinity and creates the need for reconstruction of what
was
lost.
In “Preparations for Victory,” the speaker instructs himself in how to
behave
like a man, and attempts to follow his own instructions. When he
is
unable to rise to the militarist ideal, the attempt to conform to this
construction
of manhood first strips the speaker of individuality, and, finally,
strips
all humanity from the poem. There are suggestions of the sensual
language
which poets like Owens and Gurney used to describe almost utopian
communities,
but Blunden’s soldiers never coalesce into a utopian community capable
of
salving the dehumanizing experience of war.
“Manly move among/These ruins, and what you must do, do well,”
(Blunden,
lines 5-6) the speaker says in address to his soul. Though his
body
is young (line 2), his words indicate a desire to be an adult, a man in
full;
his words suggest that achieving manhood will come through living up
to
a militarist ideal: unflinching courage in the face of terrain ruined
by
war. To spur himself to courage, the speaker attempts to reassure
himself
that he will not die when he says, “as yet may not be flung/The dice
that
claims you,” but the use of the phrase “as yet” —and, in truth, the
repeated
use of the word “yet” throughout the poem—gives a sense of the
inevitability
of death, even in the opening stanzas. In the first line of the
second
stanza, the speaker’s courage already flags, “ ‘I’ll do my best,’ ” his
soul
answers, and sadly: he is already setting up excuses in case of
his
failure to achieve manhood, and that failure begins to seem as probable
as
his death.
In the second stanza, the speaker again explicitly comments on how a
man
becomes a man, saying, “The body, poor unpitied Caliban,/Parches and
sweats
and grunts to win the name of Man.” (lines 17-18) These words are not
in
direct opposition to the previous, “what you must do, do well,” but
something
has shifted; instead of the “manly” movements of a young, heroic body,
the
reader sees the labored movements of a slave. The name of man is
not
given to a hero drenched in glory, but to a “Caliban” drenched in sweat.
In the first lines of the third stanza, the speaker switches from
identifying
himself as “I” to identifying himself as a member of a group, “we,” but
unlike
the gentle, loving communities Featherstone points to, this group is
composed
of slaves, drudges. The group has moved from the garden of the
first
stanza to “slimy cellars,” (line 23), the underground realm of the
corpse,
where their “pale sleep” is eerily deathlike. In the final lines
of
the poem, even this faceless group of half-dead laborers disappears,
and
the only combatants left are earth and air. The speaker, who
longed
for manhood in the first stanza, has lost not just his quest for
masculinity,
but his individuality and his very existence. Far from
reinforcing
militarist ideals of masculinity, “Preparations for Victory” shows the
desire
to achieve these ideals as the first step towards utter loss of self.
From the beginning of Randall Jarrell’s “The Lines,” there has already
been
an utter loss of self, and until the final poetic line there are no men
in
the poem, there are only things: so long as men remain within the
state,
the military machine, they are completely lacking personhood. As
things,
they can only reclaim masculinity upon release from the state, either
through
death or through discharge from the military. If military
experience
denies manhood, rather than creating it, it cannot be seen as an ideal
landscape
for the formulation of masculine identity.
The “things” in “The Lines” are slaves, just as the men in
“Preparations
for Victory” are slaves, but in “Preparations for Victory,” it seemed
that
the guiding force commands their labor toward some specific goal.
The
controlling force may ask that its soldiers toil in preparation for a
victory
which never manifests, but it does have victory as its goal. It
does
not seem as capricious as the childlike bureaucracy of “The
Lines,”
which has its soldiers “wait/To form a line to form a line to form a
line.”
(line 5). This state seems to set soldiers up in pointless lines
merely
for the fun of knocking the lines down and setting them up again with
new
soldiers. Given that the state speaks the language of a child,
and
therefore seems to understand the world in the manner of a child, the
soldiers,
being essentially subjugated to a child, cannot never be men.
Even telling these things they are men cannot make them men. They
remain
within the state for another line and a half (both poetically and
semantically),
and therefore they remain things. It is only when they are
completely
free of the state and released into survival that, at least for the
space
of a breath, they are men. The only moment where the thingness of
the
soldiers is in question is when “the things die as though they were not
things.”
Death does not return personhood to a soldier, but somehow, in becoming
a
corpse (a thing)—in that instant of changing into a corpse—the soldier
is
wholly un-thinglike.
War is rote, things are obedient, and the relationship between the
“things”
in this poem is not that of members of a community, but that of
interchangeable
parts. Featherstone has pointed to the analytical treatment of
war
and militarist ideals by male poets of the Second World War, and here
Jarrell
is almost hyper-analytical, writing without sentimentality for the
faceless
things that move through war like soldiers.
In Blunden’s poem, though men try to act as men, they are ultimately
reduced
to nonexistence; in Jarrell’s poem, men are prevented from being men
for
the duration of the war experience. Both poets demonstrate the
way
war experience can erase personhood, and it is easy to imagine, that
for
those men who survived to breathe that first, long breath of freedom,
it
would be imperative to start thinking of ways to reconstruct their lost
selfhood.
Where First World War Poets began to reconstruct themselves in terms of
each
other, instead of in terms of their relation to fate, or the state, it
seems
that the analysis of the Second World War Poets represents a desperate
searching
for a place to begin that reconstruction.
Part Two, Question #12
Jon Silkin has pointed out that Rosenberg’s poems begin at an earlier
point
in experience than Owen’s, which are structured as recollection.
(In
class I said this makes Rosenberg “more modern” than Owen.) When
we
reach World War II, we encounter a group of American poets (e.g.
Jarrell,
Nemerov, Wilbur, Simpson, Eberhart, Ciardi, and both Shapiros; Dugan
might
fit except for his avoidance of metaphor) strongly in favor of
recollection
and of the unifying, intellectualizing functions of received form,
metaphoric
structure, consistent tone, and a restrained speaker. Walsh
refers
to these values when he characterizes the war poets as adopting “an
ironic
and slightly self-mocking tone,” “verse forms and linguistic expression
communicative
of detached observation,” and “a propensity towards cultural
diagnosis.”
DANIKA MYERS ON USE OF EXPERIENCE WITHIN AN AESTHETIC
STRUCTURE
Jon Silkin has pointed out that Rosenberg’s poems begin at
an
earlier point in experience than Owen’s, which are structured as
recollection.
(In class I said this makes Rosenberg “more modern” than Owen.)
When
we reach World War II, we encounter a group of American poets (e.g.
Jarrell,
Nemerov, Wilbur, Simpson, Eberhart, Ciardi, and both Shapiros; Dugan
might
fit except for his avoidance of metaphor) strongly in favor of
recollection
and of the unifying, intellectualizing functions of received form,
metaphoric
structure, consistent tone, and a restrained speaker. Jeffrey Walsh
refers
to these values when he characterizes the war poets as adopting “an
ironic
and slightly self-mocking tone,” “verse forms and linguistic expression
communicative
of detached observation,” and “a propensity towards cultural diagnosis.”
Choose one American poem of the second war and discuss how
the
poet uses “raw experience” as one source for the poem while creating an
aesthetic
structure that distances both poet and reader from “too much” direct
emotional
contact with that experience. What tactics prevent “too much”
reaction
to war’s barbarity? Be sure to include some discussion of form.
In Louis Simpson’s poem, “Carentan O Carentan,” (see p.13 of this exam)
a
strict balladic form sustained through fourteen stanzas distances the
reader
from the horror of the battle described. Euphemistic descriptions
push
the reader even further away from the reality of what is
described.
And yet, in spite of this distancing, the eerie imagery of lovers, the
childlike
search for guidance, the blurred distinction between death and sleep,
and
the slow build of information ultimately result in an emotional impact
more
unexpected and therefore more persistent than a more explicit poem
might
produce.
The poem is written in Sicilian quatrains, and most of the end rhymes
are
true rhymes. The rhyme emphasizes the rhythm of the verse, giving
it
an almost nursery-rhyme sound on the first reading. Although the
meter
could be described as accentual, it is also strongly iambic, in several
places
continuing without substitutions for three lines or more. Again,
the
emphatically iambic rhythm can produce a tendency towards exaggerated
pronunciation
of the stresses. This almost sing-song rhythm seems too light for
the
subject matter it contains, and effectively slows the reader’s
recognition
of the weight of the subject matter.
The images in the poem frequently demand that the reader infer what is
actually
happening, as in lines 25-26, “I must lie down at once, there is/a
hammer
at my knee,” where the speaker is shot and wounded, possibly
fatally.
Here, though the words like pain, or bullet, or shot are never used,
the
pounding of the wound is articulated in precise diction. When the
soldiers
march out, they are described not as soldiers, but as farmers (line
19),
and in lines 37-38, instead of being told what does cause “a whistling
in
the leaves,” the reader is only told “it is not the wind” (emphasis
mine).
When ships attack unseen towns, they are described only as “speaking”
to
the towns. Simpson insists that his reader deduce much of the
action
for herself, and when he does state an element of war explicitly, it is
surrounded
by pastoral images: guns sound between bright dew and blue
skies.
(lines 10-12) The effect is that of two separate mental images,
the
smoke and sound of attack weirdly superimposed on the blue idyll of a
rural
landscape.
There is an haunting recurring reference to lovers in the poem,
starting
in the first stanza—in fact, if one read only the first stanza, one
might
expect a completely different poem:
Trees in the
old
days used to stand
And shape a
shady
lane
Where lovers
wandered
hand in hand
Who came from
Carentan.
Only the fact that the trees no longer stand provides the merest
suggestion
that something ominous may happen in the poem, but in the next stanza,
it
is infantry who are marching two by two like the lovers of old.
Later,
in the ninth stanza, the speaker, apparently dying, cries out that he
did
not have the experience described in the first stanza, and, having been
shot,
he never will have this experience. This stanza simultaneously
evokes
the image of a “leafy lane” (line 35) and reiterates that this lane
does
not exist.
After being shot in lines 25-26, the speaker uses what Walsh refers to
as
“an ironic and slightly self-mocking tone,” saying, “call it death or
cowardice,/don’t
count again on me.” (lines 27-28) Instead of valiant death in
battle
being presented as the opposite of cowardice, it is shown that the
end-result
of death is identical to that of cowardice: corpses cannot be
depended
upon. It not only blurs the line between death and cowardice, but
blurs
the narrative: is the speaker dying, or, having been wounded,
running
from further engagement with the enemy? This also sets up certain
overtones
to the deaths of the officers in the final stanzas.
The ironic tone continues as the speaker calls out to his mother,
“everything’s
all right,” (line 29) deceptively seeming to reassure her that he is
unharmed,
when the next stanzas tells that, far from unharmed, he is merely
reassuring
her that his death is unsurprising, nothing to be overly horrified
by.
The hollow, unreassuring nature of this does the opposite of
reassuring,
serving instead to unsettle and upset. He laments what is undone in his
life,
and looks briefly away from the scene of battle to the destruction of
vegetation.
This is somewhat confusing, coming, as it does, on the heels of a
reiteration
of the absence of trees.
At this point, the speaker begins to call out to
officers
for guidance: the Master Sergeant, the Captain, the
Lieutenant.
All are “sleeping.” The speaker seems childlike as he begs for
guidance,
“the way to turn” (line 42), “what’s my duty,” and the “sleep” of his
officers
seems almost enchanted, or fabulistic, especially when he reaches the
Lieutenant,
who is “a sleeping beauty.” (line 51). The alignment of death and
cowardice
in stanza seven shows the betrayal the speaker feels, and it is
reinforced
by the use of sleep to represent death. If, in fact, the officers
were
sleeping while their men fell in battle, they would be cowardly,
indeed.
Though they are dead, the speaker still feels a certain betrayal that
they
cannot come to his aid. Also in this section, the narration
switches
between an “I” voice and a “we,” voice, and, given that some six
stanzas
previously he has been shot and bid farewell to his mother, it almost
seems
he is speaking posthumously, and the “we” represents his voice joined
with
the other voices of the slain, expressing their communal bewilderment,
need
for guidance, and sense of betrayal.
In the second half of the poem, the speaker seems
like
a child, crying out to his mother and then to others in need of
aid.
In the first half of the poem, he walks where lovers have walked and
appears
as a farmer toiling at harvest. He is aligned with various
innocent
parties, and thus his death seems more tragic. As the reader
works
through the poem, in order to see what happens she must constantly
strip
away images in order to bare the combat scene: in this poem,
there
are no trees, no lovers, and no farmers. A company of soldiers in
battle
dress march through a field with guns ready, and are ambushed by the
enemy.
The entire line of command is slaughtered, and most of the enlisted men
as
well—or so it is implied in the final stanza, where the lines, “before
we
met with you/we never yet had lost a man/or known what death could do,”
(lines
54-56) imply a staggering destruction of what was once whole.
Instead of explicitly describing war experience,
Simpson
doles out details like clues written in riddles, forcing the reader to
infer
and internalize the experience. The weird tension between
innocence
and destruction and the negative writing—telling what is by telling
what
is not—combine to a slow, eerie unfolding. It is the slowness and
complexity
of the revelation that draw the reader in; she cannot at first see
clearly
what is going on, so she looks closer, and then, again, closer.
By
the time she realizes what she is seeing, she has seen so clearly that
she
can never shut her eyes—but, more: she almost feels complicit in
the
horror for having pulled out a magnifying glass in order to really get
a
good look. The soldier who speaks, speaks as an innocent somehow
trapped
in a horrible experience, and Simpson manages to leave his reader
feeling
a similar appalling confusion at how she ended up knee-deep in corpses,
when
a minute ago she was wandering down lover’s lane, admiring
foliage.
These tensions—between form and narrative, between fabulistic or
classical
tones and personal narrative, between images and realities—are
incredibly
effective in combination, and though they do slow the reader’s receipt
of
the images, the subversive tactic of making the reader create the
images
for herself ultimately increases their impact and persistence.
KRISTEN SILVER ON WORLD WAR II TECHNOLOGY IN POEMS BY JAMES
DICKY
AND HARVEY SHAPIRO
Historians say that in World War I the privileged/educated
classes
encountered for the first time, up close and personal, the barbaric
consequences
of the Industrial Revolution and modern technology – developments they
had
previously experienced primarily as advances in personal convenience.
By
World War II, critics say, this new destructive vision of mechanization
had
become a familiar trope for the modern world in general, so poets of
the
new war witnessed the spectacle of techno war with a mature cynicism
and/or
a mature philosophical need to confront its implications. Jeffrey
Walsh’s
phrases “the machine and God” and “aesthetics after war” point to these
conflicts.
Other critics have written extensively about the pervading image of
bombers
in World War II poetry.
Choose one poem from each war, or two poems from the second war, and
discuss
their presentation of mechanization and technology. You may wish to
include
some discussion of form in the poems. For example, does poetic craft
falter
under the power of weapons? contain it? extol it? make it ironic?
By the Second World War, technology had greatly changed how
battles
were fought, increasing the amount of destruction that could be done.
In
particular, aerial warfare allowed for devastation on a massive scale
through
the use of both conventional and chemical weapons. Poets writing from
their
experiences in these aerial assaults explore the aesthetics of
technological
warfare and the particular psychological effects it causes, which
linger
long after the war. The treatment of technology in James Dickey’s “The
Firebombing”
and Harvey Shapiro’s “Battle Report” reveals how aerial assaults
isolate
the flyer from destruction on the ground and how this detachment
continues
to resonate long after the war as they grapple to understand the damage
done
and to measure their own culpability for it.
In “The Firebombing,” James Dickey reflects back on the beauties and
horrors
of mechanized warfare, remembering, twenty years after the fact, the
bombing
of Beppu. One of the poem’s two epigraphs –“Or hast thou an arm like
God”
–recalls what Jeffery Walsh argues in “Second World War Poetry: the
Machine
and God,” that the poetry of World War II “dramatiz[es] the
encroachment
of technological warfare in which the machine, the creator of illusory
aesthetic
spectacle and the dispenser of death, expropriates many of the powers
and
functions traditionally attributed to God” (153). In Dickey’s case,
however,
technology does not become the figure of supremacy; instead, it causes
him
to take on god-like power. When Walsh discusses Richard Eberhart’s poem
“Aesthetics
After War,” he makes a point about the sick beauty of war fought from a
god’s-eye
view. Dickey was a radar observer on a fighter-bomber (Shapiro
226),
which makes Walsh’s observation about Eberhart particularly relevant:
“The
glowing and eerie radar screen parked aircraft ‘wings folded back
ethereal
as butterflies’ and the arithmetical purity of the mark 18 gunsight,
such
objects belie their own reality. In perceiving their formal perfection,
the
poet should also be aware of their illusory nature, for they contribute
to
a masking of machine-destruction” (173). The blue light of the radar
screen
recurs in Dickey’s poem, reducing experience to flashing images.
Due
to the distance of the airplane and the minimizing effects of radar,
when those on earth
Die, there is not even sound;
One is cool and enthralled in the cockpit
Turned blue by the power of beauty,
In a pale treasure-hole of soft light
Deep in aesthetic contemplation (171-76)
From this view, reality is disguised; the dying do not scream and “the
death
of children is ponds/ Shutter-flashing”(159-60). The many individual
deaths
are “one death” (153). This view evinces how greatly distance affects
perception
in aerial warfare: The reality of the loss cannot be understood from
afar.
Consequentially, the deaths are minimized because individuality
disappears
in the collective sacrifice.
The expanse separating the plane and the victims causes the speaker to
feel
“The honored aesthetic evil/The greatest sense of power in one’s life”
(186-87).
Yet this power does not satisfy. He longs “To get down there or see/
What
really happened,” but he can only imagine the annihilation that
resulted
from his actions (249-50). Unable to shed a position of power in this
assessment,
his voice sounds like an omnipotent proclamation: “All leashes of dogs
/
Break under the first bomb” (123-24). Since these depictions are
imagined,
he takes on the role of creator, which gives him the same god-like
power
he had as destroyer. The speaker wants to span space and time in order
to
view the destruction close up, without being its victim, but he is
aware
that this is impossible. Comparing the victims to homeowners in his own
neighborhood,
he knows he cannot say to them, “Come in, my house is yours, come in”
(260).
There is a greater distance than between himself and his neighbors, but
this
comparison indicates that there is a similarity. The disassociation he
felt
in the cockpit has carried over to his post-war life. The lawn mower
takes
on great significance; it is a machine that keeps neighbors at a
distance.
As physically close as he may come to his neighbor while they both push
their
mowers, their yards are distinctly separated by different-colored
grasses.
If they do ever cross these boundaries, it is only for the meaningless
interaction
of “borrow[ing] the hedge-clippers” (258). Psychologically, the speaker
cannot
bridge the gap between himself and his neighbors, let alone his aerial
view
and that of the napalmed villagers.
Since “The Firebombing” weaves back and forth from
past
to present, some sections feel disconnected and surreal, and these
disjointed
thoughts are amplified in the poem’s form. Dickey uses enjambment and
the
expansion of space between words and phrases to mirror the
psychological
fragmentation of thoughts and memories. They reflect an oneiric state
of
suspension, whether the speaker is up in the bomber or just hovering
between
his past and his present. For example, referring to the “red dust” of
the
firebombing, he states, “That is what should have got in / To my
eye”(162-5).
This use of enjambment splits the word ‘into’ in half, which indicates
that
this break in the line is very intentional. The phrase, “To my eye”
reflects
an essential theme of the poem: perspective is everything. Another line
taken
out of its immediate context emphasizes an acceptance of blame that is
stated
more subtly when looking at the whole sentence: “And when a reed mat
catches
fire / From me, it explodes through field after field / Bearing its
sleeper”
(215). When in the second line of this quote the speaker asserts, “From
me,
it explodes”, it acts as an acceptance of responsibility for the
bombing.
By surrounding words and phrases with extra space,
Dickey
slows the pace of the poem and causes the poem to take on the airy
quality
of a dreamscape. It also represents thoughts and images as not properly
connecting.
Dickey employs this device to describe his memory of flying:
“Going
invisible passing over on/
Over
bridges roads for nightwalkers” (40-1). The
disconnectedness
he feels while above enemy land is mirrored in the form, and the
lasting
effects of this detachment are reflected in a later passage. Long after
the
war, he stands in a pantry, overwhelmed by his past to the extent that
he
is unable to access the present:
Blinded by each and all
Of the eye-catching cans that
have
gladly caught my wife’s eye
Until I cannot say
Where the screwdriver
is
where the children
Get off the bus
where
the fly
Hones his front
legs
where the hammock folds
Its erotic daydreams (79-85).
The fact that the same visual fragmentation he felt flying reoccurs
when
describing the speaker’s suburban life indicates that his experience
has
had a lasting impact, resulting in these disjointed thoughts. It points
to
his difficulty reconciling the brutality of war with the quotidian
details
of his normal life.
Harvey Shapiro’s treatment of mechanized warfare in
“War
Report” shares some of the same implications as Dickey’s, but he
focuses
more on the life of war’s machinery and judges that it shares a greater
part
of the blame. The poem begins by saying that “the Adriatic was no
sailor’s
sea,” claiming it for the Air Force, most likely because of the dead
men
in downed planes the sea as claimed, which is more clearly hinted at as
the
poem continues. The plane’s crew “raced above the water for [their]
lives,”
hoping to make it to land (2). At the end of the first stanza, we see
why:
their engine has been hit by “rank, meaningless fire / that had no
other
object but our life” (4-5). This description, by omission of the actual
enemy
attacking them, gives the bullets the power and the will to potentially
take
lives. In the third stanza, the airmen retaliate, and Shapiro phrases
it
in such a way as to make it ironic. The flyers “Gave to the blue
expanse
can after can / Of calibers, armored clothes, all / The rich
paraphernalia
of our war”(10-12). Instead of describing the bombing of their enemy as
a
destructive act, Shapiro treats it as more of a gift offered to the
sky.
Again, the enemy does not exist in this passage and this lack of a
human
target elicits the same detached feeling Dickey addressed through other
means.
In this detached reality, there is no enemy, just weaponry.
The crew survives this battle, and there is further example of the
disconnected
nature of aerial warfare in the second section. Shapiro calls the
“flak”
firing at the plane “impersonal,” an adjective that we tend to
associate
with human beings rather than inanimate objects (25). Perhaps he does
this
because bullets and bombs do take action and are animate, taking on the
will
of the humans who control them. Only here, as before, the reader does
not
see these enemies, so the bullets act as their emissaries, taking their
place,
and through this, seeming to take on some of the culpability for these
absent
figures. Moreover, it points out that there is nothing personal between
these
enemies, especially because they do not even come into face-to-face
contact.
In warfare fought at great distances rather than in hand-to-hand
combat,
the enemy is unseen and can only be assessed and measured by the
weapons
they deploy. Further humanizing the weaponry, they are also treated as
having
a sexual nature, at least metaphorically: “Europe rolled to its
murderous
knees/Under the sex of guns and cannon”(31-32). However, instead of
having
the power to create, these phalluses destroy, acting as the opposite of
a
life-giving force. So instead of embodying a god-like power, these
weapons
represent humanity.
The psychological harm of this kind of warfare is depicted at the end
of
this section, revealing that the gunner is haunted by images of war in
his
dreams. The strongest image of this poem, particularly in its relation
to
the theme of war’s cold technology and the mental reverberation of war
experience,
takes place in the fourth section:
In this slow-dream’s rehearsal
Again I am the death-instructed
kid,
Gun in its cradle, sun at my back,
Cities below me without a sound
(62-65).
In this passage, the speaker refers to the dreams of war that still
haunt
him, within which he is forced to kill again. Unlike Dickey, rather
than
accept the blame for his actions in wartime, he seems to point the
finger
at a “capitalist military system operating beyond his control” that
Walsh
describes (179-180). He has been “death-instructed,” emphasizing that
he
is a “social being acted upon” rather than being the one in power.
Walsh
notes, “in such a poetic analysis the stress is upon exploitation
rather
than upon sin and damnation” (180). Furthermore, to say that he was
instructed
in death rather than in killing disassociates him from the actual act,
falling
back on the idea that he was just following orders. An earlier dream
passage
seems to indicate that his actions are performed by rote and without
reflection,
as if the gunner has become the machine: “From target to target he
rode.
/ The images froze, the flak hardly mattered”(29-30). First of all, in
this
section, Shapiro switches tenses, talking about the gunner in the third
person
rather than the first person. This choice serves to further remove the
speaker
from his own experience in the war and from his dream self. In this
section,
the gunner seems more mechanized than human, even to the extent that he
seems
unconcerned with incoming fire and the death it could bring.
Reflecting
Dickey’s line about the soundlessness of the earth from the height of
an
airplane, Shapiro is also unable to understand the reality of the
violence
in which he participated. In the end, even though he “faces the
mirroring
past,” his mind hesitates to try to comprehend what is happening in the
silence
below him.
For the flyer crews of World War II, the technology of airplanes,
radar,
and napalm deceptively distanced them from the victims of their acts of
war.
Both Dickey and Shapiro grapple with their own roles in the war and
come
to different conclusions, but their participation in aerial warfare has
forever
influenced their thoughts and perceptions of the world. Regardless as
to
whether the weaponry of war takes on the characteristics of hidden
enemies
or offers, to its operator, a god-like power, it functions to distance
these
airmen from the reality of their destructive acts, even making them
aesthetically
stunning. This unreality reverberates in their consciousnesses long
after
the war as they try to reconcile the beauty and the horror.
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