There are nominal human beings here – a mother visiting her son at his base – but they are subordinate to the world created by these lines. … The planes, instruments of death, are really charmingly awkward – like funny animals in the zoo – while the men are no less awkward as they climb "clumsily as bears." There is the poignant touch of a parenthetical "(a boy’s)" to identify the head disappearing into the plane’s hatch, after which "the green, made beasts" – "made" is a fine, surprising touch – "run home to air." As with the sleeping men in "Absent with Official Leave," or the plane trying to land in "A Front," Jarrell succeeds in investing the scene with both dignity and oddity: the poet’s eyes don’t quite believe what they see, and there is surprise that unfolds as those eyes moves from one observation to the next. The largeness and alien quality of the experience take it beyond any "moral" attitude of condemnation or rueful superiority, as in the three-line parenthesis about home coming planes: [Pritchard cites the 3 lines in parenthesis.] The origin of the bombers has to be repeated to be believed.