The Poem Losses written by: Randall Jarrell, who was a poet, literary critic, and teacher, from New Orleans, served in the United States Air Force during World War Two. This helped Randall Receive most of his ideas and material for poems like this one. It was not dying: everybody died.It was not dying: we had hied beforeIn the routine crashes-and our fieldsCalled up the papers, wrote home to our folks,And the rates rose, all because of us.When people died in war it didnt impact the majority of the people in the United States, they would just contact the papers or whoever sent the letters to there family and went on fighting the war.We died on the wrong page of the almanac,Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend,We blazed up on the lines we never saw.When Randall referred to people dying on the wrong page of the almanac, this just meant that when people died they were marked down as a casualty of war and not of natural death.Scattered allover the land fitting with a friend or maybe someone they have just met and never saw before. The line they never saw before is the line between them and whom they were fighting. They couldnt see this line but they new it was there and what was needed to be done to cross this line.The soldiers were not that old, at one point Randall says, We died like aunts or pets or foreigners. (When we left high school nothing else had died for us to figure we had died like.) This describes how they hadnt really experienced death like they did when they went to war.In our new planes, with our new crews; we bombedThe ranges by the desert or the shore,Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores_And turned into replacements and woke up One morning, over England, operational.The soldiers would fight with new people and new equipment, because they were all replacements for the ones who died. They would bomb places and shoot things up and when they were shot up they would be r...
