Wilfred Owen's Mental Cases And Disabled

Wilfred Owen was an exceptional poet of his time. His poetry explores the distinctive idea of the physical impacts of the war and the mental impacts of the war. Owen exposes the reality of war using a portrayal of his horrific experiences of the battlefield. He demonstrates his perspective on war by revealing his ideas through his poetry using linguistic sound devices and techniques which is paramount to a genuine understanding of Owen’s distinctive idea and focuses on the impact that the war had on the individual soldiers and their lives. Two of Wilfred Owen’s poems that explore the horrific experiences and the physical and mental impacts of the war are “Mental Cases” and “Disabled”.

“Mental Cases” is a series of graphic descriptions of young men who are being treated in hospital for shell shock and war-related mental illnesses. The soldiers who Owen describes are returned home to face a lifetime of nightmares, unable to re-enter the society for which they were fighting for due to their severe injuries. Owen’s aim is to shock and to describe in stark detail the ghastly psyched symptoms of mental torment.

Owen explores the
physical impacts of the war in “Mental Cases” as he paints a graphic visual image of the men who suffered from shell shock. The men are shown to be unable to eat properly as they “slob their relish”, and their ‘hellish’ appearance is reinforced through the comparison of their faces to skulls in the simile “Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ teeth wicked”.

To portray the physical impacts that the war had on the soldiers, “Mental Cases” portrays the graphic imagery of this poem. Owen utilizes the regularity of trochaic pentameter. Each line alternates between the stressed and unstressed beats, with the most significant words being positioned on the stressed beat. This is shown in “Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ teeth wicked” where the words “teeth”, “leer”, “skulls’” and “wicked” are the stressed beats. This trochaic pentameter paints a graphic image of the physical injuries that the soldiers suffered in the war.

“Disabled” is a narrative poem that tells the story of a soldier returning home from the frontlines of WWI having lost his limbs. It recounts the impacts that the loss of his limbs has on his future, his identity and the ways others perceive him.

Owen explores the physical impacts of the war in the first stanza. We are introduced to the physical disability of the soldier as in “Legless, sewn short at the elbow”. Not only has he lost his legs and an arm, he has also lost the meaning of his life. The clipped monosyllabic words in the description pronounce the man’s dismal situation.

To convey the changing perspective of the soldiers Owen uses tonal shifts with the tone moving from serious and confronting images of the battlefield to more familiar and comforting images of a football match. Contrast is made between the “blood-smear” from football, which is viewed as a trophy and the uncontrollable “leap of purple” from the war which results in the soldier’s alienation from society. The imagery of his life bleeding out of him through the wound on his thigh, and the use of the word ‘purple’, a colour denoting life and vitality, shows that the ordeal the soldier had gone through when he had been injured had a deep impact on him physically and because of this physical impact has now changed his desire to live mentally.

The mental impacts of the war are conveyed in “Mental Cases” through the use of a combination of visual and aural imagery to capture the mental experiences of the young men and reminds the reader that memories are not just visual, but aural also. This is shown in the quote “they must see things and hear them”. These graphic memories are communicated through onomatopoeic words and convey the sound of guns with “batter”, as well as the visual effects of the guns with “shatter”.

The audience is immediately addressed by Owen with the confronting rhetorical question “Why sit they here in twilight?” This suggests an uncertainty of identities as the soldiers are in a state of confusion and no longer recognizes who they are anymore, nor do the people of their community.
The symbol of “twilight” serves to represent the liminality that the soldiers are undergoing and shows that they do not know where they belong either in day or in night. This mental ambiguity places a great impact on the soldier’s lives as the uncertainty of identities not only affects them on the battlefield but in their every day life after the war. Owen describes the soldiers as beasts using imagery as in “dripping tongues”. The men as well as losing their identities have now lost their human qualities and no longer have control over their
minds.

To portray the mental impacts conveyed in “Disabled”, Owen reveals the isolation of the soldier in the first stanza with the words “dark”, “shivered”, “ghastly” and “grey”. This is a sharp contrast to the second stanza in the lines “Town used to swing so gay” and “glow-lamps budded in the light blue trees” as a sense of euphoria and romance is in the air suggesting the untroubled days of youth, compared to the isolation and depressing nature of the first stanza.

In addition to the fact that thee soldier had become physically handicapped, he has been mentally scarred as “now he will never feel again how slim girls’ waists are, or how warm their subtle hands”. He remembers how it was to be a strong man physically but desolately he is trapped in his own body, a sharp decline in his mental and emotional strength. Owen concludes “Disabled” with the final line “Why don’t they come?” This final rhetorical question summarises the theme of the poem: the futility of young men’s participation in a war which will leave them mentally scarred and unable to participate in society or hold any hope for their future.

Wilfred Owen portrays the physical and mental impacts of the soldiers during the war and describes the horrific experiences that led to changing their lives. He demonstrates his perspective on war by revealing his ideas of his reality of war using linguistic techniques through the poems “Mental Cases” and “Disabled”.