I work with this guy. Sometimes (always?) it can be so exasperating to work with someone so exceptionally right-brained, so intense, so passionate. Kaloka! But then I remind myself that poetry is distilled experience, ergo concentrated. Got to give it to this guy, malupit itong tulaero. (award winning too). To poetry lovers, watch out for more from him --

The 21st Century's Two Greatest Anti-War Poems.

(A comparative analysis of the poems "Dulce et Decorum Est" and "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" using the elements of poetry)

The poems “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by American poet Randell Jarell and “Dulce et Decorum Est” by English poet Wilfred Owen are arguably the most powerful poems condemning two of the most brutal and devastating events in human history—the two world wars of the 20th century.

In their sheer power, symbolism, dramatic imagery and masterful use of metaphor, the two poems are strikingly similar. This, on top of the fact that they share the very same theme and were written in the same historical epoch–the decades after the Industrial Revolution that saw the new industrial powers struggle against each other for world power and thrusting the innocent world into wars that were, for the first time, worldwide in scale. (Keylor, 2005)

As such, both poems deal with the fears and moral struggles of soldiers, and with such consummate poetic skill and brilliant use of words. How could this not be, after all? With both poets enlisting as soldiers during their own times, it is only expected that they each themselves suffered these fears and moral qualms that they wrote so profoundly of. Jarell had enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps in 1942, the very year that World War II broke out. Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, in turn, was able to closely observe the trench wars and chemical warfare of World War I, later on going on to become known the greatest of all British First World War poets. He died in action.

In both poems, the accurate descriptions of soldiers are mere helpless boys forced into the unbearable darkness of war, evoke feelings that are dark and immeasurably sad: “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is only five lines, but it describes both accurately and powerfully the feelings of disorientation and vulnerability suffered by the ball turret gunners of World War II. As Jarell himself explains in a note accompanying the poem, the ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of the B-17 or B-24 bomber planes –such as the one used to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This small sphere was shared by two .50 caliber machine-guns and one man –the shortest and smallest man that could squeeze into the small space. Jarell writes: When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the fetus in the womb.

As for Owen's “Dulce et Decorum Est”, even the very first lines conjure bleary images of the trenches, evoking in the reader a deep sadness: Bent double, like old beggars under sacks / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge / Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs / And towards our distant rest began to trudge. / Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots / But limped on, blood-shod. / All went lame, all blind;/ Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots / Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Jarell's five line-poem, in turn, brings vividly to mind the image of “the nightmare fighters” attacking the cold, miserable gunner as he crouches upside-down in his lonely turret. Both poems awaken a very primal response in the reader.

It is in theme, however, where the two poems are so essentially and profoundly similar. For sure, Owen relies more on irony, but his subject is no different than that of Jarell's. Both poems are clear and unwavering cries against war. Whether dwelling on a group of soldiers or a single soldier, Owen always displays, in Lorrie Goldensohn's words, a "brooding care for the dead, the mutilated, and the mutilated dead of war," including the enemy. (Goldensohn, 2004) In an early poem, “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” Owen asks “What passing bells for these who die as cattle?” In “Dulce et Decorum Est” he writes his own searing riposte, “Only the monstrous anger of the guns.” The poem includes a haunting description of a gassed soldier's dying convulsions—“If could hear, at every jolt, the blood/Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs” and ends with a caustic citation of a Horatian maxim, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory,/ The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori. (translated, “sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country”). What more fitting denunciation of the patriotic blather so common during World War I, touted at that time as “the war to end all wars” (Keylor, 2005) –the war “sold” by governments of that time to young men as a patriotic adventure of their lives.

Owen's sensibility is echoed in Jarrell's “Death of a Ball Turret Gunner”. A sergeant in the Army Air Force from 1943 to 1945, Jarrell trained pilots in air navigation at bases in the United States. Most of his poems deal with pilots, soldiers and prisoners, and thus have a social perspective that is broader than Owen's, insofar as they tackle with the culpability of soldiers for war's violence. But at their core is that very message of Owen: that soldiers are victims of the bullet, the shell and the entire sadism of military life. Like Owen, Jarrell dwells on the fact that the soldiers are not men but boys, and that they are forced to fight. They are less players in the war, but mere pawns. “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is probably the most powerful portrayal of this.

To convey their urgent message, both poems make excellent use of simile, metaphor and symbolism to evoke powerful feelings: Owen's first lines, Bent double, like old beggars under sacks / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, are fitting comparisons of soldiers with beggars and hags—implying the powerlessness, poverty and vulnerability of old women. Further on in the lines, Dim through the misty panes and thick green light / As under a green sea, I saw him drowning, the reader is cast helplessly into the feelings of a drowning man.

But it is Jarell who succeeds more, using the barest minimum of words and powerful symbolism, in creating a very moving image and sending his message straight to the heart: 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. Such is his vivid symbolism of a helpless fetus unleashed suddenly from the warmth of its mother's womb into the dangers of the world.

It is only in rhythm, meter and rhyme where the two poems differ: Some rhythm and meter are evident in Jarell's poem, through lines 1,2 and 4. Line 3 seems to be slightly off in this respect, but it adds a nice touch to the poem. In these lines the author has used a falling meter where the first segments of each line are stressed more than the latter. The first segment contains the primary thought, while the second segment supports or qualifies it. In contrast, Dulce et Decorum est is a 28-line poem written loosely in iambic pentameter, as expected of an English poet of that literary period.

But these are only minor differences. All in all, the two poems are so strikingly similar in theme, symbolism, genius use of words and power-- they are the two greatest anti-war poems of the 21st century.

Goldensohn, Lorrie. (2004) Dismantling Glory. Irvington, New York. Columbia university press.

Keylor, William R. (2005) . The World Wars. In Twentieth-Century World: An International History (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) Revised 5th edition.