The Death Of The Ball Turret Gunner

Bertrand Russell once said, “War does not determine who is right- only who is left”. Throughout the 19th and 20th century, war has ravaged the world’s lands, often solving nothing. But one decent outcome is its creation of numerous noteworthy poets of its time. Poetry has been an outlet for countless stricken heroes of war and witnesses of the brutality of the American Civil War, the First and Second World Wars and the War in Vietnam. Stephen Crane, a late 19th century, short-lived writer of Naturalism and Impressionism, shoots images of weeping families in his poem “War Is Kind” (Literature and its Writers, 1063). Randall Jarrell, a poet of the early 19th Century, displays his experiences of life and death in the Air Forces in his poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (L&W, 1065). In Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” (L&W, 1064-1065), he paints a grisly
Dramatic irony is a poetic device that has greatly enhanced the meaning and impact of the wars poems of the 18th and 19th century. It is one of the poet’s most useful tools in nourishing the interest of its readers, because it provides a contrast between an instant situation and a future outcome. In “War Is Kind”, Crane Illustrates a man, possibly a general, informing a range of family members of the passing of their kin. He informs the maiden of her lover’s “thirst for fight” (7) and how the “unexplained glory flies above” (9) a battle-god’s kingdom “where a thousand corpses lie” (11). He attempts to comfort a babe, whose father “tumbled in the yellow trenches” and “Raged at his breast, gulped and died” (13-14), all in honor of “the virtue of slaughter” (20). He consoles the grieve-stricken mother “whose heart hung humble as a button” (23). All of the speaker’s statements contradict each other in order for Crane to show that, despite the title of the poem and the constant refrains of war being kind, it truly is heartless and