Try this as an exercise: put the stanzas onto a timeline? What order do you find they go in?
- Why has the poet, Alison Fell, decided to structure the poem in this way?
- Which words indicate the passage of time?
1. Structuring the poem in this manner allows us to see the effects of the conflict on bothpersonas within the poem, creating a stronger effect by mixing in both of their viewpoints. The male pilot equates his action with a sexual thrill; seeing the image of Marilyn Monroe’s skirts blowing up reminds him of the thrill of dropping the bomb. Yet, the same cannot be said of the ‘scarlet girl’, who may lay down in submission but its one of a very different kind. The structure of the stanza order allows us to place these two images side by side.
The stanza in the middle beginning ‘On the river bank’ creates a ‘calm before the storm’ feeling. If this stanza is symbolic of the moment of impact (bees = plane, drizzle = noise/bomb, rhododendrons = people), then this is the dividing point of the poem – and the dividing point in this conflict. From this moment on, life is not the same, for either of the personas within the poem.
2. The passage of time is indicated by the words ‘later’ being repeated. How much time has passed is up to the reader to decide. We are included in the present before the consequences with the stanza ‘In the Enola Gay’ writting in present tense. His reflection on the events and her death as a result of them are then described as ‘later’. The suggestion of this is that when the pilot is in the moment of physical conflict (dropping the bomb), although he is nervous he doesn’t truly understand the horrendous consequences of what he is about to do. It is only as he gets older, lives and experiences more and reflects upon his past that the horror truly strikes him.
“Ladybirds
Ladybirds”
Why are these words written separately at the end? Leave a comment to win a prize!
Collection B: Clashes and Collisions 