"Disabled" by Wilfred Owen depicts the life of a young man who has lost his arms and legs in World War I. It draws a sharp and drastic contrast between the young man's life prior to joining the Army and after having been injured.
Owen uses skillful visual and aural imagery to underscore his meaning throughout the poem. In the first stanza, he describes what the soldier looks like: he is sitting in a wheel chair listening to children play. Owen captures the image of the soldier by describing his suit as "ghastly...grey" and then describing how it is sewn: without legs and with the arms cut off and stitched at the elbows. This is an interesting choice for the poet because it is far more profound to consider the suit than it is to be told "a man with no legs and no arms sits in a wheel chair." As readers, we can defend ourselves against such direct communication, but it's harder to ignore the atrocities of this man's life when his suit is described because the portrayal begins benignly with color and pulls the reader into the man's world.
The process of the man becoming injured offers striking visual images that suggest that the soldier was complicit in his own wounds. He is described in stanza two as having "[thrown] away his knees" and having poured his own blood "down shell holes" in stanza three. By using this imagery, Owens forces the reader to see the absurd image of a young man actively getting rid of his own body parts. At the same time, the imagery sets up the next scenario, which describes the man's life before the war and his reasons for signing up to go. It also reflects how a critically injured person might feel guilty for having become wounded. This visual technique is also an extension of the technique Owen used in stanza one. If he truly described the carnage, some readers would turn off from engaging with the poem. Instead, he puts the incidents in these preposterous images.
The soldier's life prior to the war and his reasons for signing up for the Army are described in the longest stanza. We see a young man who has fallen for the lies about war (see Owen's poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est"), who was underage and who signed on in order to impress his girlfriend.
In the next stanza, it becomes clear that no young woman will be impressed because he notices women's eyes as they move from him to uninjured men. Just this one visual image, about the eyes, captures the entire tragedy of a young man who goes to war for glory and then discovers that war is actually a hellish catastrophe.
Owen fought in World War I and did not survive it. He knew firsthand what war was like, in contrast to what he and his school friends had been told about it a few short years earlier. He was a gifted poet who knew how to communicate horror to those who have never experienced it themselves and who could not be counted upon to engage continually with the enormity of it. He pulls us into this world image by image and challenges us to consider how many more young men we should send to such a fate. He would have considered it an even greater calamity that we have yet to figure out how to stop this unending process.
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