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Help with a donald hall poem!?
What is this poem talking about? I'm very confused, I've never been good at poems and I just found this one and it interests me but i can't figure out exactly what its about, and I have nooo idea who is talking. No, it's not my homework, I would just like some help! thank you!
High on a slope in New Guinea
the Grumman Hellcat
lodges among bright vines
as thick as arms. In 1942,
the clenched hand of a pilot
glided it here
where no one has ever been.
In the cockpit the helmeted
skeleton sits
upright, held
by dry sinews at neck
and shoulder, and webbing
that straps the pelvic cross
to the cracked
leather of the seat, and the breastbone
to the canvas cover
of the parachute.
Or say that the shrapnel
missed me, I flew
back to the carrier, and every morning
take my train, my pale
hands on a black case, and sit
upright, held
by the firm webbing.
The Grumman hellcat was a U.S. fighter plane used in World War II. (The date 1942 in line 4 also establishes this as a poem related to World War II.) The first 17 lines of the poem describe a plane that crashed during the war and remained for many years at the crash site on a mountainside in the Pacific (you can look up New Guinea's location). We know it's been there for a long time, because the pilot's flesh has rotted away, leaving just a skeleton.
Then, with the line "Or say that the shrapnel," the poem changes direction. Suddenly, it's being spoken in the first person -- not just "a pilot" or "the helmeted/skeleton," but "me" and "I" and "my." Suddenly the poem is being narrated by someone who survived the war and came home to live a peaceful civilian life.
So the poem imagines two different fates for one young man. He could be one of the many combatants who died in the war, or he could be one of those who lived. There are thousands, hundreds of thousands, of Americans who fit into both categories. I don't know what Donald Hall's personal World War II experience was. You can web search him to find out. Obviously, he didn't die in the war. Maybe this poem is his attempt to express some awareness of how narrowly he missed dying.
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