The Firebombing by James Dickey
"The Firebombing" by James Dickey is a reflective poem that spans nearly three hundred lines of free verse, contemplating the devastating air raid on the Japanese city of Beppu during World War II. Written two decades after the event, the poem explores the stark contrast between the airman's mundane suburban life and the horrific destruction he witnesses from his aircraft. The narrative begins with the airman's journey to his plane, highlighting his comfortable existence and ultimately leading to the grim reality of the bombing mission.
Dickey employs rich, imaginative imagery to convey the beauty of the landscape juxtaposed against the chaos of war, using techniques such as enjambment and alliteration to enhance the poem's emotive power. The speaker grapples with feelings of guilt and detachment, revealing a profound inner conflict about the morality of his actions. Throughout the poem, themes of fate, guilt, and the human experience emerge, culminating in a haunting reflection on the lasting impact of violence. The work serves as a poignant commentary on the emotional toll of warfare, inviting readers to engage with its complexities and moral questions.
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Subject Terms
The Firebombing by James Dickey
First published: 1965, in Buckdancer’s Choice
Type of poem: Elegy
The Poem
“The Firebombing” is a musing in almost three hundred lines of free verse, some twenty years after the event, on the horror of incinerating the Japanese city of Beppu with “300-gallon drop-tanks/ Filled with napalm and gasoline.” The vagaries of fate are announced in the first line, a peremptory “Homeowners unite,” but the bitter truth is that though “All families lie together,…some are burned alive.” The account is impressionistic and roughly follows a sequence of events beginning with the airman’s nighttime trudge to his plane (“A booted crackling of snailshells and coral sticks”) and culminating in his safe return “To where Okinawa burns,/ Pure gold, on the radar screen.” As the speaker coolly recalls the destruction he viewed from the safety of his “glass treasure-hole of blue light” with his “Bourbon frighteningly mixed/ With GI pineapple juice,” he keeps reflecting on his comfortable middle-class suburban life. The bombing mission, Okinawa to Beppu and back, becomes the narrative line along which are strung the speaker’s ironic comparisons of the deaths he caused and the life he enjoys.
The speaker’s story of his flight begins with lovely passages describing the flights through banks of cumulus clouds, emerging into a vision of the landscape beneath, with its “Rice-water calm at all levels/ Of the terraced hill.” The rivers below guide the death-ship through the sky, where five thousand people lie sleeping below, and as the airman in memory maneuvers his deadly freight into position he thinks of his own house, “Where the lawn mower rests on its laurels” and “Where the diet exists/ For my own good.” His catalog of his homeowner’s bounty is extensive, but it modulates into guilt:
I still have charge—secret charge—
The carnage that the airman finally unleashes is unspeakable, turning “the bathhouse upside down,” “kicking/ The small cattle off their feet,” and “Flinging jelly over the walls.” Leaving “a town burning with all/ American fire,” the airman follows “the huge moon-washed steppingstones/ Of the Ryukyus south.”
The narrator concludes by confessing that after all this reliving of the event he is “still hungry,/ Still twenty years overweight” and unable to imagine just what agony he inflicted on the sleepers below. Yet despite it all, he doubts that he could “say to any/ Who lived there, deep in [his] flames,” “Come in, my house is yours.” The truth is he has lived with Beppu for twenty years and remains American “and proud of it.” His final judgment is “Absolution? Sentence? No matter;/ The thing itself is in that.” Years later, James Dickey confessed to “guilt at the inability to feel guilty” and of how “The detachment one senses when dropping the bombs is the worst evil of all—yet it doesn’t seem so at the time.”
Forms and Devices
Long lines and short lines come and go in no pattern, with single lines interspersed among stanzas as long as twenty-one lines, as short as two. Most lines are enjambed to imitate an uninterrupted flow of images in the mind, and words are often separated by several spaces for rhetorical effect in reading. Dickey is a master of the imaginative conceit, as in the “undeodorized arms” of the underside of the plane wings where the deadly fluids bide their time. The plane disappears into the marvelously oxymoronic “white dark” of the cumulus, and “Rice-water calm” and engines that “ponder their sound” exploit the pathetic fallacy. Frequent alliteration (“dark dream”) and, especially, sibilance (“silver side,” “sea/ Slants,” “sleep-smelling”) combine with occasional assonance (“Come up,” “dark arms,” “eight blades”) and repetition (“Think of this think of this/ I did not think of my house/ But think of my house now”) to complement sense with sound.
Other subtle patterns can be seen in the preponderance of gerund forms that structure so many of the passages recounting the mission: “Coming out,” “passing over,” “Sliding off,” “coming slowly,” “going forward,” “Going: going,” “dogs trembling,” “Rivers circling,” “sleeping off,” “racking slowly,” and “flying inside.” This structural device disappears in the “suburban” passages dense with details of domestic life but reappears in the second round of the bombing horror (“clutching the toggle,” “fulfilling/ An ‘anti-morale’ raid,” “Singing and twisting,” “kicking,” “Flinging jelly,” “Holding onto”). Only reading “The Firebombing” aloud, obeying Dickey’s spacings and enjambments, will do full justice to the rhetorical fullness of the poem. What at first glance seems a scattering of words in random lines emerges finally as the product of considerable self-conscious artistry.
A sort of perverse romantic menace pervades the cockpit imagery: “One is cool and enthralled in the cockpit,/ Turned blue by the power of beauty,/ In a pale treasure-hole of soft light,/ Deep in aesthetic contemplation.” Many of the images startle at first reading. To speak of being “twenty years overweight” is witty and striking; “Oriental fish” with eyes that reveal “one tiny seed/ Of deranged, Old Testament light” are creatures that challenge the explicator; and a hammock that “folds its erotic daydreams” executes an imaginative transference from the hammocker to the hammock; “Japan/ Dilates around [the aircraft] like a thought”; in a cruel vision “another/ Bomb finds a home/ And clings to it like a child.”
Bibliography
Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Judith S. Baughman, eds. Crux: The Letters of James Dickey. New York: Knopf, 1999.
Calhoun, Richard J., ed. James Dickey: The Expansive Imagination. Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1973.
Calhoun, Richard J., and Robert W. Hill. James Dickey. Boston: Twayne, 1983.
Dickey, James. Classes on Modern Poets and the Art of Poetry. Edited by Donald J. Greiner. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004.
Dickey, James, Barbara Reiss, and James Reiss. Self-Interviews. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970.
Heyen, William. “A Conversation with James Dickey.” Southern Review 9 (1973): 135-156.
Kirschten, Robert. James Dickey and the Gentle Ecstasy of Earth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.
Kirschten, Robert, ed. Critical Essays on James Dickey. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994.
Lieberman, Laurence. The Achievement of James Dickey: A Comprehensive Selection of His Poems with a Critical Introduction. Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1968.
Van Ness, Gordon. Outbelieving Existence: The Measured Motion of James Dickey. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1992.