6 Final Project Milestone Two: Draft of Methods and Results Sections /AUT
6
Final Project Milestone Two: Draft of Methods and Results Sections /AUT
Christopher Jones
Southern New Hampshire University
Dr. Dassani
PSY-444 Senior Seminar in Psychology
July 23, 2021
Final Project Milestone Two: Draft of Methods and Results Sections /AUT
Music Therapy
Music therapy refers to the evidence-based and clinical interventions that use music to attain individualized objectives during a therapeutic session. These interventions are aimed to help children, youths, and even aging people. Besides, the person or professional offering music therapy should have attended a credible music therapy course. The music therapist is responsible for developing treatment plans that accommodate the client’s strengths and needs. Moreover, the client may be a group or an individual and it is upon the music therapist to determine how to meet up their client’s needs. The services offered in music therapy should align with the potential strategy, objectives, and goals for the setting and client. Without determining the setting to conduct the intervention then the procedure can be a failure. Some of the music interventions include listening to receptive music, songwriting, discussing lyrics, imagery and music, music performance, music learning, a combination of other arts and music, and music-assisted relaxation (AMTA, 2015). Additionally, music therapy can be used in preventive, mental health, medical, rehabilitative, developmental, educational, or wellness care areas. Music therapy is a procedure that protects the rights of the public, and the therapist should practice ethically, safely, and competently. The music therapy procedure allows for professional collaboration if the therapist needs help from another expert when specialty care is required. Furthermore, a music therapist should uphold respect when responding to the family and client’s needs, preferences, and values.
Setting and Treatment of Subjects
The experimental procedure was carried out in three separate settings that included residential, after-school care and at school to determine music therapy effectiveness in enhancing social competence in adolescents and children. For this study, 45 children between the ages of 6 to seventeen years with ADS were selected. The three groups are consistent of 12, 13, and 20 students respectively (Gooding, 2011). Besides, in each set, the same appropriate curriculum aligned to the specific age was used. The targeted skills for this study were self-management and peer relations which are the specific social skills deficits. Some of the active interventions used in the procedure included improvising, music performance, and music movement. Also, cognitive-behavioral methods such as feedback, modeling, problem-solving, and transfer training were integrated into the study. Data concerning participants’ social functioning was taken before the study, during, and at the end of the intervention. The data was captured from appropriate guardians or parents, participants, or through observing their behaviors.
Results
After the procedure, the social functioning skills of the selected participants were improved. These improvements were observed in the self-ratings of post and pre-school participants. Also, improvement was noticed in school participants’ posts and pre ratings by the researcher. Besides, an improvement was seen in residential post and pre-treatment rating by the case manager and also found in post and pre-self-rating for participants in residential site. Further improvement was seen from the participant’s behavior in the three settings. There were also additional changes seen in instructor, case manager ratings, and peer and self-ratings in residential participants. Therefore, from the experimental procedure results, music interventions can be used to improve social competence in adolescents and children with social problems.
Statistical Analysis
Compared to typical growing children those with ASD evolve dissimilarly in proportion and exhibit different skills. For instance, labeling body fragments are easy for children with ASD but when it comes to images it is hard to tag body fragments (Ashburner, Ziviani & Rodger, 2010). Besides, children with ASD have the capability of discovering colors but cannot categorize the color. Children exhibiting ASD find it hard to respond to titles, do not make eye contact, wave goodbye, or grin at caregivers without been told to (Hallie & Ruth, 2009). Furthermore, for them to converse or acquire one’s responsiveness they may use finger PowerPoint or use eye contact. From research to determine perceptive development on melodious rendezvous in fledgling children from early stages to school phase, results showed that children respond positively to music intervention. For instance, the results from an exploratory study show that in various instructional music settings flow-related behaviors were observed in infants, toddlers, and school-going children. Besides, individual temperament, environmental conditions, developmental trends influence music engagement. The results showed that both self-correction and self-assignment were observed to increase in preschool years. However, school-aged children’s self-initiation inactivity decreases because they already receive assignments from their teachers. Moreover, school-going children demonstrate frequent self-correction at this stage because they do not want to disappoint other people’s expectations.
Considering children’s musical experience when outside their class, adolescents exhibit a flow in conventional and self-assignment compared to when in class. The reason for this is because extra-curriculum activities produce conventional flow compared to academic activities. Moreover, research shows that play is usually displayed in third environments’ or in middle childhood whereby ‘third environments’ refer to an outside classroom or at home (Custodero, 2005). In toddlers and infant’s music structure helps them gain cognitive skills at an early age. For instance, the ‘peek-a-boo’ song involves anticipation for the song’s phrase structure. However, literary children begin monitoring sequences at the age of three but the helps toddlers and infants to master actions at early stages of life. Besides, it brings out the perception that children exposed to structural music exhibit cognitive skills at an early stage compared to those attracted to structures not music related. Additionally, in the developmental stage of life gesture quality is observed through movement after sound interpretation and musical instrument manipulation. Toddlers and older infants’ rhythmic responses were deliberate to recorded and live music while school-aged children showed few opportunities to physically respond freely to music during instruction. Here gesture use in children presented cognition evidence because it reflected rhythm, pitch accuracy, and formal structure. For example, associating hands and voice in toddlers and infants shows that they are expressing the sequence of the song.
Interventions for a Child with ASD
Although some researchers argue that the environment that a child with ASD serves impacts their learning but the personnel to deliver the intervention determines the success of the procedure. A child who joins formal school without emotional or social competence will have a hard time when socializing and participating in class (Fleury, Thompson & Wong, 2014). Besides, a child with ASD is vulnerable to challenges when it comes to participating in classwork. Moreover, having them follow a repeated behavior or restricted setting makes it challenging for them to contribute in class. These behaviors have limitations because they cannot make a friend, and this limits education curriculum access. By restricting students with ASD from accessing social and academic skills from peers limits their school success. However, if allowed to rediscover themselves they can make a positive impact in school. Therefore, teachers must address the needs of a child in an instructional classroom so that they improve their class performance or participation. Teachers should implement various classroom activities that meet the needs of all children. Caregivers such as parents can be trained to help their children improve their emotional and social skills.
In conclusion, social and emotional skills are the key characteristics for the development of good academic mental health in adolescents and children. Without these two skills, a child cannot participate in class because they have fear of the unknown. Besides, it means that they are not exposed and remain in a restricted environment that hinders them from interacting with peers. Therefore, caregivers and teachers must discover the needs of each student and know how to help them achieve success.
References
American Music Therapy Association. (2015). Music Therapy in Mental Health—Evidence-based Practice Support. https://www.musictherapy.org/about/scope_of_music_therapy_practice/
Ashburner, J., Ziviani, J., & Rodger, S. (2010). Surviving in the mainstream: Capacity of children with autism spectrum disorders to perform academically and regulate their emotions and behavior at school. Research In Autism Spectrum Disorders, 418-27. DOI: 10.1016/j.rasd.2009.07.002
Custodero, L. A. (2005). Observable indicators of flow experience: A developmental perspective on musical engagement in young children from infancy to school age. Music Education Research, 7(2), 185-209. doi:10.1080/14613800500169431
Fleury, V. P., Thompson, J. L., & Wong, C. (2014). Learning How to Be a Student: An Overview of Instructional Practices Targeting School Readiness Skills for Preschoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Behavior Modification, 39(1), 69-97. doi:10.1177/0145445514551384
Gooding, L. F. (2011). The effect of a music therapy social skills training program on improving social competence in children and adolescents with social skills deficits. Journal of music therapy, 48(4), 440-462.
Hallie Kay, Y., & Ruth Helen, Y. (2009). Phonological Awareness Is Child’s Play. YC Young Children, (1), 12.[supanova_question]
4-1 Group Discussion: Limits of Functions P. 129-144 Exercise 3.2.2. Using only
4-1 Group Discussion: Limits of Functions P. 129-144
Exercise 3.2.2. Using only the definition of limits, prove that each of the following
limits holds.
(1) .
Exercise 3.2.4. [Used in Section 3.2.] Find an example of functions such that , and that does not exist.
Exercise 3.2.5. [Used throughout.] Let be open intervals, let and let be a function. Prove that exists if and only if exists, and if these limits exist, then they are equal.
Exercise 3.2.8. [Used in Example 4.6.1.] Let be an open interval, let and let be a function. Suppose that for all , and that . Prove that does not exist. [Use Exercise 3.2.1.][supanova_question]
Education Inequality
Writing Assignment Help Abstracts are not required for the Draft Proposal]IntroductionII. Literature ReviewIII. MethodA.ParticipantsB.InstrumentationC.ProceduresIV. AnalysisV.DiscussionVI References CitedVII AppendicesIntroduction[This is the first 1-2 paragraphs and should establish why the topic is interesting and important. Define key terms.II. Literature Review[What are the most important sources on this topic?What are the main past findings, debates or theories on this topic and how do they relate to the research being proposed?Purpose of the proposed study–Hypothesis or guiding research questions.]III. Method Participants[Who or what (such as in content analysis) is going to be studied?How are they going to be selected?How many?] Instrumentation[How will the variables be measured?] Procedures[How will the data collection be carried out?Are there any ethical issues, and if so how are they to be addressed?]IV. Analysis[What kind of data analysis will be done? For example will there be tables and graphs? Will it be a qualitative analysis looking for patterns and themes? ]V. Discussion[Limitations of this proposed research][Implications of the potential results ] VI References CitedVII Appendices [supanova_question]
Fashion Retailing
Read Carefully And Follow Requirement!*Part1: Copy 1-6, write after each sub-topics. Need to analyze Supreme in San Francisco based on pop-up retailing strategy. (500 words) 1. The Target Market: the demographics, the psychographics, and the economics of the end client you determined. Customers need to write by primary secondary and tertiary. 2. The Operations you observed.3. The Human Resources you observed.4. The Level of Service you received.5. The Merchandise Management procured.6. If you were the owner/manager/buyer, how would you improve 1–5?Establish, evaluate, and examine all the above concepts together in a minimum 500-word paper with cited research, analysis, perspective, and an address and the image of the independent retailer you visited.Part2: If you were to establish a pop-up retailer in the city you reside(Alameda), how would you conduct the following aspects of the business? Also copy 1-5 and write directly after each one. (300 words)1. The Target Market2. The Human Resource3. The Operations4. The Level of Service5. The Merchandise ManagementPart3: Imagine planning and utilizing marketing to engage your customer and create sales within your department. Discuss your plan to develop such an ad for your product/department(men’s outdoor apparel). Share your reasons for choosing the specific format. (200 words)Part4: How do you keep OTB free so you can buy for growth? Think of what you would do to free up OTB, so you can buy more for promotion. How would you know what items should be marked down? How would you liquidate a dog or how you might handle a question mark. ( 150words)[supanova_question]
Works Cited Cyr, Marc D. “Randall Jarrell’s Answerable Style: Revision of Elegy
Works Cited
Cyr, Marc D. “Randall Jarrell’s Answerable Style: Revision of Elegy in “the Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 46, no. 1, 2004, pp. 92-106. ProQuest, https://ezproxy.pgcc.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy.pgcc.edu/scholarly-journals/randall-jarrells-answerable-style-revision-elegy/docview/208083047/se-2?accountid=13315.
Randall Jarrell’s Answerable Style: Revision of Elegy in “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”
Abstract
Translate
Cyr discusses the position of Randall Jarrell’s The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner in the elegiac tradition. Among other things, Jarrell is engaged in a project of revising, indeed rejecting the style and ethic of a traditional genre, elegy, to make his poetry more adequately address and render the conditions of twentieth-century life in general, and twentieth-century war in particular. In writing what amounts to an anti-elegy, however, he manages to avoid mocking his elegiac subject, and with his avoidance writes mocked elegiac.
Full Text
Translate
This paper is concerned with the position of Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” in the elegiac tradition, but to define that position I must begin with another genre and another poet: the heroic epic and John Milton. In the preamble to Book IX of Paradise Lost, Milton anatomizes and scornfully rejects both the style of traditional epic-“The skill of Artifice or Office mean” (39)-and the heroic ethic of personal courageous acts, proposing instead “the better fortitude / Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom / Unsung” (31-33). This proposal of a “higher Argument” (42) and prayer for an “answerable style” (20) come after he has demonstrated the inadequacies of epic style and heroic ethic in his account of the war in heaven in Books V and VI, an account many readers find ridiculously funny, with, for example, angels wearing armor and throwing mountains at each other (not to mention Satan inventing the cannon). Arnold Stein calls this episode a “mock heroic” (17-20), but William Riggs points out that that mode derides everything to which it is applied, and therefore would tar the loyal angels with the same brush used on the rebels, something Milton wishes to avoid. So Riggs proposes a modification, seeing Milton as writing not mock heroic, but “mocked heroic in which poetic manner is intentionally depreciated by its inability to answer adequately to the demands of a heavenly subject” (120).1
In “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” Jarrell is engaged in a similar project of revising, indeed rejecting the style and ethic of a traditional genre, elegy, to make his poetry more adequately address and render the conditions of twentieth-century life in general, and twentieth-century war in particular. In writing what amounts to an anti-elegy (see below), however, he manages to avoid mocking his elegiac subject, and with this avoidance writes mocked elegiac.
Elegies traditionally have offered to their readers some form of consolation for a particular death and often, by extension, for death itself. If, as Peter M. Sacks puts it, “. . . mourning is an action, a process of work” (19), traditional elegies are a part of that process, allowing mourners to find solace in the transcendence or transfiguration and persistence of the elegiac subject. Indeed, the long history of the elegiac tradition is part of that solace; centered on “The vegetation god [who is] the predecessor of almost every elegized subject and provides a fundamental trope by which mortals create their images of immortality” (26-27), “… the elegy takes comfort from its self-insertion into a longstanding convention of grief. And … an individual elegy may borrow the ritual context of consolation. . .. The unique death is absorbed into a natural cycle of repeated occasions” (23-24, Sacks’ emphasis).
But Jahan Ramazani argues that the modern era produces a revolution in elegy. he sees most good modern elegies as being “not a guide to ‘successful’ mourning” (ix), but “melancholic,” “mourning that is unresolved, violent, and ambivalent” (4). They are “anti-consolatory and anti-encomiastic, anti-Romantic and anti-Victorian, anti-conventional and sometimes even anti-literary” (2)-that is, they are anti-elegies and the poets who write them “attack the dead and themselves, their own work and tradition; and they refuse such orthodox consolations as the rebirth of the dead in Nature, in God, or in poetry itself” (4). However, this anti-elegiac movement “does not disprove the existence of the conventions or the genre; ‘the transgression requires a law/ as Todorov writes, and the norm becomes visible in being transgressed” (25). Further citing Derrida and others, he argues that in perceiving something as violating a form, we simultaneously perceive the form that is being violated: The new form is embedded in various ways, sometimes by noteworthy absence of traditional elements.
Such transgressive reference is central to “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” and Jarrell uses Percy Bysshe Shelley’s elegy for John Keats, “Adonais,” for this purpose. The connection between these poems was first noted by Leven M. Dawson, and because his arguments are so closely tied to the language of both poems, it is best to quote Jarrell’s here in full:
From my mother’s sleep 1 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.2
Dawson focuses on the first four lines of stanza 39 of “Adonais”:
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep
He hath awakened from the dream of life-
Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife .. . (343-46)
Dawson notes that the gunner
also awakens from the “dream of life.” As, paradoxically for Shelley, the death of Keats was birth, birth in the Gunner’s new “state” is death; in his condition life is an unnatural, insecure “dream” from which one awakens to “stormy visions” of “strife” with “phantoms” (“black flak and the nightmare fighters”) and then dies. . . . Everything in war … is reversed: up is down, one ascends to die, life is merely a dream of earth, awakening or realization is “nightmare.” . . . [Man] enters into abnormal states where he must dress unnaturally and regressively and where insensitivity becomes a sustaining virtue. (Dawson’s emphasis)3
So far so good, but this sharp focus on “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” as a war poem distracts Dawson from Jarrell’s reversal of the central consolatory movement of traditional elegy: Rather than the vegetation-god figure dying / descending to rise / live again, the gunner rises to die and descends permanently, and the gunner’s movement is shorn of even the most rudimentary rites of funerary mourning, the kinds of rites Shelley, following tradition, so voluminously details.
Further, and perhaps more importantly, Dawson’s other focus element-stanza 39 of “Adonais”-leads him away from stanza 52. Jarrell’s central image, the ball turret itself, is a paradoxical version of Shelley’s powerful simile for his conception of the Platonic universe:
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.-Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! (460-65)
In a note to the poem, Jarrell explains that “A ball turret was a plexiglass sphere set in the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine-guns and one man. . . . hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the foetus in the womb” (Selected Poems xiii). The clear plexiglass sphere of the ball turret (only about half of which protruded from the plane’s body) is a literally inverted version of Shelley’s dome, and the dome is not merely serendipitous: Shelley and Jarrell share not only the use of the dome to represent earthly existence-“Life” or “the State”-but also the philosophy that generates Shelley’s original image, a belief in “Necessity” or “Necessarianism,” a concept associated with Platonic (or neo-Platonic) philosophy (Notopolous, 176-77).
Shelley’s clearest expressions about this philosophy appear in his notes to Queen Mab. In Note 12: 6.198, he declares that
He who asserts the doctrine of Necessity means that, contemplating the events which compose the moral and material universe, he beholds only an immense and uninterrupted chain of causes and effect, no one of which could occupy any other place than it does occupy, or act in any other place than it does act. . . Motive is to voluntary action in the human mind what cause is to effect in the material universe . . . Every human being is irresistibly impelled to act precisely as he does act… (Complete Poetical Works, l:305-6)4
In ” Adonais,” Shelley’s Necessarianism is, besides the apotheosis of Keats, apparent in the poet’s attitudes towards the critics he blames for causing Keats’ death. For the first two-thirds of the elegy the critics are vilified, but Shelley eventually moves to a recognition (I will not say acceptance) of the fact that they were simply living out their necessary natures, simply being what they had no choice but to be (316-33). Similarly, according to Suzanne Ferguson, for Jarrell “Necessity is essentially the working out of Natural Law or Natural process, all that a man in his physical state . .. must acquiesce to” (59), to which he adds the effects of man’s own impulses and actions, what Jarrell, in “From the Kingdom of Necessity,” a postwar review of Robert Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle, enumerates as “everything that is closed, turned inward, incestuous, that blinds or binds: the Old Law, imperialism, militarism, capitalism, Calvinism, Authority, the Father, the ‘proper Bostonians,’ the rich” (Poetry and the Age, 208-9). The forces, natural and human, act through the abstract entities of Trade and the State (S. Ferguson, 84) and in Jarrell’s war poems these entities perform the same role as Shelley’s critics do, as representatives of Necessity.5 Shelley’s Necessarian passage leads into stanza 38 and the final movements of the elegy, the Platonic apotheosis of Keats into a pure white star, “A portion of the Eternal” (34O).6 Unfortunately for the gunner, his dome looks downward and there is no escape. he dies in the State.
Shelley, then, provides the specific foil for Jarrell’s anti-elegiac purpose, but besides his own impulses Jarrell also had a forerunner and perhaps model in writing anti-elegiac war poems, Wilfred Owen. Jarrell considered Owen “a poet in the true sense of the word” (Kipling, 169), and William H. Pritchard quotes a letter to Robert Lowell in which Jarrell comments that “a good deal of Owen is the best anybody did with the first world war,” and proposes that Jarrell took Owen as his “example” (112). As well as the poetry, Jarrell also had what might be called an agenda supplied in the Preface that Owen drafted for a volume of his poetry to be published after the war;7 that Preface reads in part,
This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds or lands or about glory, honour, any might, majesty, dominion or power nor anything except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity-Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. all a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful. (2:535)
While it is interesting to note that Owen’s list of what he excludes is almost a summary of Milton’s rejection of epic heroic in Paradise Lost, and while the “pity” section has generally drawn most attention,8 it is the opening and closing statements of what I quote above that I want to look at in the context of this paper.
First, on the issue of “heroes”: Like Milton, Owen does not deny their existence, only their traditional depiction and thereby definition. His own depiction has led some readers to see his soldiers as sheer victims, a view most famously held by W. B. Yeats, who excluded Owen (and all other so-called “trench poets”) from The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892-1935 (1936) on the grounds that “passive suffering is not a theme for poetry” (xxxiv). And both Owen and Jarrell can present soldiers as inactive, uninstigating recipients of suffering: For Owen, “The Sentry,” “Exposure,” and even “Dulce Et Decorum Est” are good examples, and for Jarrell “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”-the gunner is trapped in the State and we never see him do anything, not even die. Jarrell even offers a defense of this depiction in his attack on Marianne Moore’s post-war heroicizing and mythologizing of the war’s participants:
She does not understand that they are heroes in the same sense that the chimney sweeps, the factory children in the blue books, were heroes: routine loss in the routine business of the world. . . . she does not remember that most of the people in a war never fight for even a minute-though they bear for years and die forever. They do not fight, but only starve, only suffer, only die: the sum of all this passive misery is that great activity, War. (Kipling, 129)
This sounds very much like Milton’s proposed heroic of “Patience and Heroic Martyrdom” and like some form of Necessarian absolution for everyone involved, even combat soldiers: They had no choice.
But Owen and Jarrell do not always leave their soldier-subjects in the diminished position of abject victims; those soldiers often commit old-style heroics, but how those so-called heroics are to be judged is at issue. In “Apologia pro Poemate Meo,” for example, Owen presents himself and his companions as “Merry” because “power was on us as we slashed bones bare / Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder” (5-8). In “Insensibility,” he calls “Happy” those veterans “who with a thought besmirch / Blood over all our soul” (40-41), who “before they are killed / Can let their veins run cold” (1-2). And in “Spring Offensive,” attacking soldiers
. .. rushed in the body to enter hell,
. .. there out-fiending all its fiends and flames
With superhuman inhumanities,
Long-famous glories, immemorial shames . . . (40-43)
Of these, Owen notes that “Some say God caught them even before they fell” (37), but the survivors of the attack “speak not… of comrades that went under” (46).
And Jarrell is equally unwilling to derogate his soldier-subjects by turning them into sheer, inactive pawns or depicting them as mere children and not responsible adults. The clearest demonstration of this is “Eighth Air Force”: The poem depicts the airmen as a composite of Christ and his executioners, and the speaker as not only one of them but Pilate, Pilate’s wife, Lady Macbeth, and perhaps judas as well.9 The representation of the airmen as playing like children or sweating in fear is empathetic, even sympathetic, but not exculpatory. The speaker, who is “a man, / [Who] did as these have done” (12-13), responds to an unspoken demand that he “say that man / Is not as men have said: a wolf to man” by calling these men (and hence also himself) “murderers” (4-6). To “content the people” he will “give up these to them” (14-15), but that means of contentment is a lie:
. . . for this last saviour, man,
I have lied as I lie now. But what is lying?
Men wash their hands, in blood, as best they can:
I find no fault in this just man. (17-20)
Richard Fein has argued that “just man” means that these are “only man” (160), and so are only acting as Necessity requires, but these “puppies” (12) are nevertheless also murderers, and the deliberateness of the speaker’s lie argues for their participation in war being not just the result of compulsion, but also an act of adult, reasoning will. And while the gunner in “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is not seen to act, he is a gunner on a combat mission, as much (at least potentially) murderer as victim, perhaps one of the modern “heroes” for whom Jarrell is searching out, in Owen’s words, a “Poetry … fit to speak of them.”
The other section of Owen’s Preface most pertinent here is the last part quoted above, about “these elegies [being] in no sense consolatory.” Owen certainly has notable successes in writing non-consolatory elegies-“Insensibility” and “Spring Offensive,” for example, and “Exposure” (which Jarrell much admired [see Kipling 169])-but regarding “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” as an anti-elegy, Owen’s failures are more instructive. In “Asleep,” for example, despite the rest of the poem’s pointed mocking of cliched elegiac, he ends with the consolatory note that at least this soldier is out of his suffering: “He sleeps less tremulous, less cold, / Than we who wake, and waking say Alas!” (20-21) Perhaps more enlightening is when Owen is seduced by the traditional form; Sacks argues that there are “numerous moments in which elegists seem to submit, by quotation or translation, to the somehow echoing language of dead poets” (25), this being part of the placement of a particular elegiac subject into “the ritual context of consolation” (24, Sacks’s emphasis). One poem in which Owen very clearly falls into such a trap is “Elegy in April and September (jabbered among the trees),” which is deliberately modeled on Matthew Arnold’s elegies (Stallworthy, n184) and so toothachingly sweet (example: “Still! daffodil! Nay, hail me not so gaily,- / Your gay gold lily daunts me and deceives . ..,” [4-5]) that a reader can easily be distracted from the point that the young man is dead and gone, period. Another example of this seduction is “Anthem for Doomed Youth”: The first seven lines of this sonnet’s octave are an angry attack on the “mockeries” (5) of home-front mourning rituals of prayers, bells, and choirs for those killed in battle, but line 8-“And bugles calling for them from sad shires”- seems to toll Owen back into escapist comfort in a sestet that tells us that in the eyes of boys
. . . Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds. (11-14)
As Jon Silkin notes, “… Owen seems to be caught in the very act of consolatory mourning he condemns . . .” (21O).10
Jarrell was aware of these traps: In a review of Alex Comfort’s The Song of Lazarus, he notes how the aptly named Comfort massively appropriates his language forms from other poets, such that “In their elegiac, almost pastoral reflection in these poems, death and the War seem hardly more than allegorical emanations of some passive, amoral reality, . .. mak[ing] it hard to take any death seriously” (Poetry and the Age, 155). Jarrell himself manages to avoid the traps, though. First, although it echoes the images and the language used for those images in “Adonais,” for . various reasons “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” does not come across as in any way Romantic in tone. For one thing, the language is not aureate, either in vocabulary or syntax. This feature could make the poem flat and undramatic (which is how Pritchard characterizes most of Jarrell’s other war poems, 111-20) and that seems to be Bruce Weigl’s take on the tone, though Weigl does not present it as a negative criticism: “The speaker, a dead man, is alive enough to speak to us of his death but too dead in spirit to evoke anything more than a stripped down version of his brief existence …” and therefore “… his observations of even his own horrible death read more like reportage than lyric poetry” (16-17). However, I think this accurately captures only the last line, a line that I think can be described as possessing the same characteristics Jarrell ascribed to the last stanza of Robert Frost’s “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep”: “a flat ease, [which] takes everything with something harder than contempt, more passive than acceptance” (Poetry and the Age, 43). Part of the power of Jarrell’s last line is, I believe, that its crudely observational (reportorial?) nature contrasts starkly with the imagistic, often metaphorical (poetic?) nature of the first four. In fact, according to a quantitative acoustic analysis by Linda Bradley Funkhouser, in reading the poem Jarrell (along with a group of professors) shifts tone when reading the fifth line, delivering it “curtly” (391), but of all the readers studied, only Jarrell “consistently observes caesuras” (395), providing a particularly long pause before line 5, thus not only highlighting the last line but also its difference from the preceding four (396). I think Weigl, in his characterization of the entire poem as possessing “literalness” and being an “almost completely unadorned presentation of [the gunner’s] death” (16), is reacting to the same quality in Jarrell’s poem that has often led readers to describe Owen’s war poems as possessing photographic realism, particularly “Dulce et Decorum Est.” But, as Ramazani remarks (specifically regarding “Mental cases”), “What we call the ‘realism’ of [Owen’s] war poetry is a rich intertextual effect. . . . The suffering victims become ‘real’ precisely because of, not in spite of, the literary intertexts …” (78). Owen’s poems and “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” have the quality of making readers feel what is being described, and this in turn makes readers feel that they see it.
What Pritchard calls the “imagistic brevity” of the first four lines (119) and the affective force of unadorned description in the final line create a constrained tone for the poem, and this serves to help keep it from becoming a particular kind of anti-elegy, a mock-elegy, a form that can not only attack the style but the subject of the poem, something Jarrell clearly wanted to avoid, reviling some poets for being “blinder to the war than they ever were to the peace, who call the war ‘this great slapstick’ …” (Kipling, 129). Gavin Ewart’s “When a Beau Goes In” offers a useful contrast. Paul Fussell calls Ewart’s poem “typical of second War poetry in its laconic refusal to reach out for any myth” (57), and that laconic quality of attitude and the language that conveys that attitude-short, choppy lines with a doggerel rhythm; phrasing that is at times so deliberately banal as to seem not childlike, but almost preliterate; the use of slang-seems to bitterly belittle not just the mechanical slaughterhouse of modern war (there is no agency for the Beaufighter’s crash; it just happens), but the men themselves:
When a Beau goes in,
Into the drink,
It makes you think,
Because, you see, they always sink
But nobody says”Poor lad”
Or goes about looking sad
Because, you see, it’s war,
It’s the unalterable law.
Although it’s perfectly certain
The pilot’s gone for a Burton
And the observer too
It’s nothing to do with you
And if they both should go
To a land where falls no rain nor hail nor driven snow-
Here, there, or anywhere,
Do you suppose they care?
You shouldn’t cry
Or say a prayer or sigh.
In the cold sea, in the dark
It isn’t a lark
But it isn’t Original Sin-
It’s just a Beau going in. (in Fussell, 57-58)
Fussell remarks (his emphasis) that the “flagrantly un-innocent just . . . asserts the utter irrelevance of theological or any other connotations” and that “The tone is like that of the opening of Jarrell’s ‘Losses'” (58): “It was not dying: everybody died.” I find the tone quite different, however: Jarrell’s may be hard-eyed and emotionally, even morally enervated, but Ewart’s is almost flippant. I am not saying that this is not a realistic or valid response to war, by the way, and I believe “When a Beau Goes In” is a very good poem. But it does convey a sense that these lives being lost are of no value whatsoever to anything-the State?-or anyone-who is “you” in the poem? It can include combatants and non-combatants alike, the speaker, the reader, even (given line 16) the airmen who die. This poem mocks not only traditional views and consolations, but by its tone and inclusivity the casualties who are its (at least putative) subject, turning death into not just a non-event, but almost a joke. It is a mock-elegy.
One of the features that contributes to this effect is the poem’s length: Ewart has room to pile up a number of mocked cliches and ironic, even sarcastic remarks. Even were Jarrell so minded, the brevity of “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” gives no such room. That brevity also keeps him from moving to the other end of the elegiac spectrum and producing a poem of consolation: The longer one goes on in association, even oppositional association with a traditional form deeply grooved by reading and studying into the poem-making mind, the greater the chance that one will fall under its spell. This happens in just eight lines to Owen in “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” Jarrell’s brevity helps keep him from this trap.
Perhaps more importantly, though, the brevity has thematic implications. First, it opposes the lengthy form of its elegiac foil, “Adonais,” eliminating, among other things, all the traditional elements of elegy-the parade of mourners, the mourning by personified elements of nature, etc.-that Shelley so assiduously includes. Also, of course, Shelley addresses his subject’s genius and remarkable productivity, while Jarrell’s anonymous subject is an apparently ordinary young man, and the very lack of length serves to emphasize the aborting (as David K. Cornelius points out, this is a literal as well as figurative term) of a life so short it is suggested that nothing worth note was done. Indeed, even in the poem itself, the gunner doesn’t do anything except fall, wake, hunch, and freeze. We don’t even witness his act of dying, and despite the fact that he’s a gunner we have no hint of him fighting back against anything, whether the fighters or the State. In this, he closely parallels Keats, whom Shelley notes was not willing, or perhaps able to follow the Pythian example of Byron and fight the forces that attacked him. But then, both Keats and the gunner are ultimately arrayed against Necessity; Jarrell notes that the poems in Lowell’s Necessarian Lord Weary’s Castle “often use cold as a plain and physically correct symbol for what is constricted or static” (Poetry and the Age, 210), and the gunner is literally frozen inside the State. Not only did the gunner not do anything of note in his life, but there was no opportunity for doing anything anyway, and this is the common case for soldiers. What the gunner has lost is what Jarrell called “the greatest single subject of the romantics, pure potentiality” (Poetry and the Age, 98).
Another effect-although in fact it may be a cause-of the poem’s brevity is the telescoping of birth and death. Frances C. Ferguson contrasts this structure with, among other poems, “Eighth Air Force,” which she describes as concentrating “the entire poetic effort into the area of the included middle”; “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”-that is, his life-“consists only of a beginning and an ending” (171), and as Dawson points out, whereas Adonais’s death is a transcendent birth, in Jarrell’s poem “birth in the Gunner’s new ‘state’ is death” (238). The telescoping also suggests another source for “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”: T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi.” In his copy of Eliot’s The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950 (1952), Jarrell drew three vertical lines next to lines 37-39 and noted in the margin “antithesis oxymoron excl. middle,”11 and, indeed, in Eliot’s dramatic monologue, the Magus’s entire focus is on his own Messiah-induced experience. Of the human life of Jesus, there is nothing about the middle, the beginning is a subjective reflection-“. . . it was (you may say) satisfactory” (31)-and the end is a brief allusion-“three trees on the low sky” (24). But the significance of those mortal bookends is what occupies the speaker in the conclusion:
. . . were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death. (35-43)
The paradoxical relationship of life and death is at least as old as Christianity itself, but the usual Christian version is the traditional vegetation-god pattern of elegy, having death being birth into a new life; here, as with “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” the process is reversed and birth is death. The poems also share elision of the “middle” and a refusal to offer the solace of an assured and glorious afterlife. A reader who expects, even yearns for the consolations of religion or elegy is out of luck with both these poems because the poets are “no longer at ease” with these traditions.
Yet Eliot, while rejecting any easy and comforting sentiment, does not reject religious faith itself-he does not mock Christ or the Magi. Similarly, Jarrell does not mock the gunner, only the elegiac form with its consolatory accretions. In Shelley, Jarrell found a fellow believer in Necessarian philosophy, but in “Adonais,” while he discovered serendipitous images, he could not, at least in the face of war, follow all the way to transcendence.12 In Owen, he found a forerunner in the enterprise of honestly depicting modern war and soldiers, and an ancillary goal to be pursued, an elegiac that is not consolatory. In Eliot, he found the elisive compression that would allow him to capture the essence of war and life, what Owen’s Other in “Strange Meeting” calls “The pity of war, the pity war distilled” (25). With “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” then, Jarrell is able to formally and thematically apprehend the qualitatively and quantitatively foreshortened nature of modern life, a life distilled in war, and do so without diminishing or devaluing his human subject. That is, he writes a mocked-elegy.[supanova_question]