cities they had bombed. They had killed these
people from afar, without ever having seen them.
Those of the crew who had survived were given
medals, and even when the airmen died, the
official story (as shown by the quotation marks
used in the penultimate line of the stanza) was
always that U.S. Army Air Forces casualties
were low. The final line of stanza 2 refers back
to the bombing missions they went on over Ger-
many; they were given maps of the target areas,
and they went ahead and bombed the cities as
they were asked to do.
Stanza 3
The first line of stanza 3 refers back to the first
line of stanza 1, denying the reality of the airmen’s
death, only with greater emphasis. But in line 2
there is a switch. The narration changes from
first-person plural to first-person singular. It is
now one individual who is speaking. It also tran-
spires that he is one of the airmen who was killed,
and he is recalling the night he died, during which
he had a dream that he was dead. In the dream,
the cities he had bombed spoke to him, asking
him why he was dying. Their words are given in
quotation marks and are therefore in the present
tense. They say that they have no complaint
about their fate if he, the dead man, has none,
but they also want to know why they had to die.
Themes
Denial of the Reality of Death
The airmen in the poem hear about death many
times, but it does not seem real to them because it
happens to someone else. This effect is created
by the use of the plural pronoun ‘‘we’’ to refer to
those who die; ‘‘we’’ is part of a collective body,
the Air Force, which continues to exist and
replenish itself, even if individual members of it
die. Not only this, the men who make up the
bomber crew do not see the deaths of others up
close, so they do not experience the reality of
death in any personal or immediate way. The
deaths of other airmen seem to them no more
momentous (or heroic) than the death of a pet,
or someone from another country (line 10)—a
person not seen, someone about whom nothing
is known. The bomber crews cause the deaths of
many in enemy cities, but those deaths occur
many miles below them and they do not see the
devastation they cause. Because death, under-
stood in this impersonal, abstract way, seems
like a routine event, hardly to be remarked
upon, the first phrases of the first two lines can
explicitly deny that death even takes place. The
airmen seem to regard their own lives as like
machines that are guaranteed to work properly
only for a certain amount of time before wearing
out like, say, an engine part, or a car tire. They
appear not to feel the tragedy or the pain of
death. In this sense, it might be said that they
are out of touch with reality.
Reality, however, begins to intrude in the last
stanza, paradoxically in the form of a dream. TheTOPICS FOR
FURTHER
STUDYRead two or three more war poems by Jarrell,
including perhaps ‘‘The Death of the Ball
Turret Gunner’’ (his most famous poem) and
‘‘Eighth Air Force.’’ Compare and contrast
these poems with ‘‘Losses.’’ How are they sim-
ilar and how do they differ? How do they
enrich your understanding of ‘‘Losses’’? Write
an essay in which you present your arguments.
Research the war poets of World War I, includ-
ing Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and
read some of their most famous poems. What
are the dominant themes of these poets, and
how do their poems compare with those of
Jarrell? Give a class presentation on the topic.
Research the Allied bombing of Dresden
and the American bombing of Tokyo and
other Japanese cities in 1945. Thousands of
civilians were killed in these raids. How did
the United States and its allies justify these
bombings? Were the bombings necessary?
Write an essay in which you argue either
that the bombings were or were not justified.
Write a war poem. You can focus on any war,
the present conflict in Iraq, the Vietnam War,
the Civil War, or any other war that captures
your imagination. Remember that Jarrell did
not experience any combat directly but was
still able to evoke convincingly the reality of
war. You will need to research the causes of
the war, how it was fought, and what the
actual soldiers experienced in combat.Losses