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
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