War-Torn Poet

More than just representing the physical pain of a soldier wounded in battle, the poem “Disabled,” by Wilfred Owen, describes quite accurately the mental and emotional pain one experiences after losing something vitally important in one’s life.

The speaker describes the subject as having, “waiting for dark, and shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,” using potent figurative language through the use of the color words “dark” and “grey” to elucidate something more than just the colors themselves (567). Black and grey often associate themselves with emptiness, a lack of presence of one or more things. In this case, the subject of the poem (a fallen soldier) lost not only his physical might and ability, but also his mental awareness and desire. That the soldier not only sees these colors, but in fact waits for and wears them demonstrates his complete emptiness. Waiting for the dark has become easier than simply looking into it; one might even say the soldier welcomes the emptiness. The soldier has lost the desire to fight the darkness he feels from losing his physical capabilities.

For soldiers with tour-ending injuries, I would submit that often the hardest part of recovery is the mental one. Evidently, this soldier signed on very young, just out of high school, and feels he lost his youth when he was injured in the war. Because Wilfred Owen only lived 25 years, and the poem is about a wounded soldier, and Owen himself was a soldier in the British Army during WWI, it’s safe to assume that the subject of the poem is Owen himself, and the poem deals with his depression and shell-shock following his first tour in the Army. He feels that he lost his youth in the blood of war, saying, “There was an artist silly for his face, for it was younger than his youth, last year” (568). The alliterative sound of “younger than his youth last year” emphasizes the fleeting youth Owen feels he had; at only 23 years of age he was institutionalized for what we now call PTSD, and he quickly lost all the illusions and dreams that often come with a youthful spirit. Though he hasn’t been significantly physically broken, the war truly broke something fundamental about Owen’s being, and sometimes it simply isn’t possible to recover from a break that big.

With his broken spirit, I don’t think Owen ever really recovered, or was able to tape together the salvageable pieces of himself after his first few years of war. He says, “Tonight he noticed how the women’s eyes passed from him to the strong men who were whole” (569). Now, clearly the poem doesn’t refer to any major and lasting physical deficiency, as Owen wasn’t permanently injured physically, but an important point on the topic of psychological wellbeing and wholeness comes up. He feels as if even psychological scars are evident and telling, and feels set apart from the other men because of his mental scars. Because he can very clearly see his injuries, Owen believes that others can as well. I think he completely loses his will to do anything but meekly exist until someone or something comes to take him away. He asks, “Why don’t they come and put him into bed? Why don’t they come?” (569). I think this is extremely indicative of the severity mental injuries can have on a person. Owen, when he was injured, was completely capable of taking care of himself, but he was so far gone mentally that he couldn’t really bring himself to complete even the simplest task. In essence, I think the poem may be asking more about why someone won’t come and put the soldier from the poem out of his misery, rather than just “to bed.”

Overall, this poem brings up important questions about being mentally broken, and how much it really takes to completely de-commission someone just through psychological injuries. The human brain tends to be pretty resilient, so for Owen to be so damaged that he essentially wrote a poem describing his want for the pain to be all over, I think he really must have had too many pieces to be able to tape them all together and come out looking like a normal person ever again. I even wonder if maybe he wasn’t too upset about dying – some think he sought out a position on the front lines in 1918 to imitate one of his admired friends, but I think maybe he wanted something to validate all that pain: either victory or death.