Suffering in ‘Disabled' Maya Marie 12th Grade

Wilfred Owen’s poem Disabled forms a narrative following an unnamed soldier through six stanzas, containing vignettes of fragments from his life, contrasting his consciousness, and therefore knowledge, throughout. Focusing on the consequences of war, Owen concentrates on the hope and purity of the young soldier before, to juxtapose with the destruction of this, him now being ‘disabled’, this label forming his identity. This central idea of the poem is heightened by it not only being portrayed from the perspective of the soldier, but also how others view him, primarily women- this determining his worth.
From the first line of the poem, Disabled, Owen emphasises the soldier’s isolation; ‘waiting for dark’, suggests that he has no distraction from his own thoughts and thus the narrator portrays the lack of value he gives his life, not waiting for morning, a new day, but instead ‘dark’, conveying the futility of life following war. Owen further heightens the idea of soldiers being trapped in between life and death, even once the war is over, by referring to the ‘ghastly suit of grey’ that this soldier wears, ‘ghastly’ similar to ‘ghostly’, with connotations of death, but not quite, echoing his borderline existence. In the last...