Most commentators on Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" have identified the poem's theme as a condemnation of the insensitive, dehumanizing power of the "State," exhibited most graphically by the violence of war. Most have also agreed that the poem's effectiveness is due in large measure to its telescoping of time … and the paradoxical use of birth imagery, especially of the womb and the foetus, to describe death. In commenting on the poem's final line, however, critics have usually stressed the ironic use of water, with its traditional associations of rebirth, in these mechanized burial rites and praised the emotional power of the understated, matter-of-fact tone, while overlooking the continuing impact of the telescoping of time and the birth imagery. (p. 9)

The telescoping of time … omits the actual moment of the gunner's death. Just as the moment of physical birth became merely an anticlimactic transferral...