Death Of The Ball Poem Analysis

When reading “The Death of the Ball”, I could see vivid images take place. It affected me because I felt that I was looking through the eyes of a mans death. Through imagery and figurative language, the poem took me along through Gunner’s last flight and down to an ending that I surely wont forget. I believe this poem is about Death and War. In the poem the Mother functions as a metaphor. The word mother is universal, since that is how we were all brought into this world, (“The life giver”). This poem began with the mother’s sleep and when the mother sleeps the speaker falls. A fall is what I believe to be a negative thing. The speaker is telling us that he “fell into the state” (Gunner). State is also a metaphor I believe for machinery war,

I could see a vivid flash of a child in the womb of his mother. This would make the bomber the mother. This is where the ball turret becomes a metaphor for the womb, in which a mother’s womb is said to be nurturing and warm. The womb of the state is cold and harsh environment that wouldn’t be very life sustaining would it, compared to a mother actual womb. There was also some animal imagery in this poem. Line two ended in three one-syllable, stressed words “and I hunched into the belly till my wet fur froze.” From when the bomber is flying at a high altitude I felt that the speakers life before war, fell, like a dream it slipped away. The six miles in between earth and the sky, gives us a sense of the heavens. The speaker wakes into reality and into a nightmare, existence into a ball turret and there were enemies fighting and attacking, In lines 3 and 4 it comes all together since it becomes reversed, that life is a dream and reality is death. “black flak and the nightmare fighters” (Gunner). The threat with death becomes even more real than life. When looking at lines 3 and 4 I could see a stark contrast between terms of imagery and