out of the blue

'Out of the Blue' is a dramatic monologue spoken by one of the people inside the twin towers on 9/11, from inside the burning building. The effect is of extreme close up on a tiny point in space in time, almost in a 1to1 narrative time. The event is narrated as it happens an appeal to a second person who could not be listening. This creates an weird effect, of an event we cannot touch, of lost people who could not speak to us, even though we watched at the time or later: the flames, the people who jumped (committing suicide): ‘wind-milling, wheeling, spiralling, falling’. It’s graceful, fluid, fast (a plunge to the death). The effect is ghostly, of a voice without a body talking directly to us.

The idea of watching is picked out in the first lines as well as the appeal to the reader: ‘You have picked me out / Through a distant shot of a building burning’. The word ‘distant shot’ is the blurred camera work of trying to zoom in so far, but also evokes the distance between us who were not involved and those who were cut off from the world but watched and re-watched trapped on camera. The narrator seems to be right beside us, following every movement of our eyes: ‘you have picked out’ - ‘you have noticed now’. The sense that this is happening now is emphasised by the use of the word ‘now’ and the present tense in ‘a white cotton shirt is twirling, turning’. The second one continues in the present, repeating ‘waving’ four times - as if calling attention to be saved - which appears in the final line of the stanza ‘Does anyone see / A soul worth saving?’ The imagery of ‘soul’ is religious (Holy Spirit), of desperation (as in ‘save our souls’, a cry for help) and ‘worth’ suggests value is being weighed. As the poem carries on, and the narrator makes repeated call for help, still ‘trying and trying’ to stay alive - weighted against the known idea in which no one could help or there is nothing that can be done, the large amount of rescue attempts (which killed many