Poems are shaping the world in their own unique way by using different figurative devices and different perspectives. Poems activate our senses by leaving different effects on us, so we have to think more to receive the real meaning from the poem like in the following three poems: the effect of love and losing in, “The Taxi”, by Amy Lowell; the effect of the pity of war and a corrupt world in, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”, by Randall Jarrell; the effect of curiosity and lack of knowledge in, “Childhood”, by Frances Cornford. All of these poems have different effects and meanings and therefore show the different ways of life and how the world works from different perspectives.
In twelve brief lines, readers are made to feel the…show more content… Without directly describing how much pain she is suffering, she is able to express her agony through images of sharpness. Stars protrude from the night skies, reflecting back to the speaker her own voice as she cries out for her lover. The wind appears to swallow her cries in its folds or to snag them on its sharp edges as the speaker continues to cry out to the one she loves. “And shout into the ridges of the wind” (line 5). She is longing for this unnamed person from whom she is being carried away. But the images of the stars, which are so far away, and the wind, which has no form, are not comforting. The stars and wind lack the ability to empathize with her needs. Though she does not mention the cab she is riding in, she does mention, in the sixth line, the effect it is having on her. As she is being carried away in the cab she has the illusion that it is not her body that is moving through space but rather the streets of the city that are rushing up and quickly passing by her. This gives the impression that she is stationary while the earth moves under her. Not only does this line provide an image, it also offers an insight into what the speaker is feeling. She is distressed because she does not want to leave her lover, while for some…show more content… We begin thinking about how corrupt war is and the pity of war. The vivid images that are installed into our minds from this poem, make this poem have an everlasting impact on us. The speaker is the dead gunner, which is the pronoun introduced in the title. Jarrell depicts the tiny enclosure the gunner is enclosed in which is almost womb-like. Jarrell describes the hose used to clean out the plane and the ‘wet fur’ which was the gunner’s lining of his coat. The poem uses an image which is suggestive of abortion to comment on the waste of war, which is like throwing people out to die. The young gunner, who comments, “From my mother’s sleep I fell into the state” (line 1), never awoke to life. Rather, he “hunched in the belly” (line 2) of the plane, this new, state-provided death womb, until he woke only to die, amidst the “black flak and the nightmare fighters” (line 4). His body was washed “out of the turret with a hose” (line 5). Thus the sleep of childhood led directly to the sleep of death, and only with waking his realization of the imminence of that death. The image of the baby animal suggested by the wet fur, in the mechanical body of the death machine, is hard for the reader to escape. The poem suggests that getting an abortion is parallel with the thought of being killed in war because in both