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 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. 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.

Try this as an exercise: put the stanzas onto a timeline? What order do you find they go in?