To paraphrase is to put something in your own works.
Paraphrasing is NOT summarizing. You do not want to shorten the original text; you
simply want to rephrase the text in more understandable terms. This should be done
either line by line or sentence by sentence.
"The Death of
the Ball Turret Gunner" is a relatively short poem by Randall Jarrell. The poem's
speaker is a gunner on a WWII bomber who uses vivid imagery to describe a combat mission
and the aftermath of his death.
The poem is only three
sentences long. Each sentence begins with an adverbial phrase or clause that locates the
speaker in a particular place or moment.
The words
fell, hunched, and loosed
indicate the speaker's sense of lack of control.
The first
sentence tells of the speaker leaving home and going straight into being a soldier,
indicated by the word State. The image of hunching in its belly is
how the gunners crouched in the plexiglass sphere of the belly of the B-17 or
B-24.
The second sentence locates the speaker six miles
above the earth, which of course is in a plane. He describes being loosed from a dream
of life - awoken from a dream - the opposite of life is death. He is awoken by the fire
of anti-aircraft guns, which is the nightmare of all gunners like
him.
The last sentece tells of the aftermath of the battle.
He tells you outright that he died, and the final resolution is that his remains are
washed out of the plane with a stem hose.
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