disabled

• Disabled


  A poem written by Wilfred Owen while he was a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland
• Wilfred Owen


  • He was diagnosed with 'neurasthenia' ('shell-shock')
  • He met his fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was also a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital
• A few days later Graves expanded his critique, telling Owen it was a "damn fine poem" but said that his writing was a bit "careless"
• Poem 'Disabled'


  • There are many irregularities of stanza, meter, and rhyme
• The voices in the poem


  Throw the soldier back into his memories
• Caesura


  Punctuation in the middle of a line to stop the reader
• Enjambment


  The poet breaks the line to have more impact with the second half of the whole line
• 'Mothered'


  No longer manly or masculine
• Woman in the poem


  • Portrayed as a carer not as a lover
• The soldier in the poem


  • Portrayed as a man without totality
• Past and present


  Juxtaposed in the poem
• Alliteration of 'g'


  • Links idealised images together
• Air growing 'dim'


  Links to girls, romantic
• Wilfred Owen: '"Threw away his legs"'
• About this time Town used to swing so gay

  Reminiscing (swing/gay)
• Colourful imagery


  • "When glow-lamps budded in the light-blue trees"
• Alliteration (girls, glanced)


  • "Girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim"
• Wilfred Owen: '"In the old times, before he threw away his knees"'
• Now he will never feel again how slim

  Girls' waists are, or how warm their subtle hands
• "Queer"


  Example of the subject's social displacement