Peripeteia

Disabled, Wilfred Owen

A young man joining up to fight would have no idea at all what the reality of fighting would have been like. The First World War was the first fully mechanised war, with mustard gas, machine guns, high explosive shells and, latterly, tanks. The nature of trench warfare was profoundly different to battle in previous wars, being essentially a long attritional process. The numbers speak for themselves:

• Eight million soldiers were killed
• Including civilians, about twenty million people died
• On just the first day of the battle of the Somme, twenty thousand men were killed, sixty thousand injured. That’s one man dead or injured every second for twenty-four hours.
• Life expectancy of a junior officer was one month.
• Around two million soldiers, sailors and airmen returned to Britian severely disabled in one way of another, with around 40,000 of them amputees.

Wilfred Owen wrote a number of contradictory things about war and poetry. In his preface to his collection of war poems, for instance, he said he was ‘above all…not concerned with Poetry’, but that ‘’The Poetry is in the Pity’. By this he was seeking to make a distinction between self-consciously stylised and elevated grand Poetry and the kind of poetry he was writing, which was more grounded in reality, more concerned with truth than style.

Owen also called himself a ‘conscientious objector with a very seared conscience’. In other words, he felt deeply ambivalent about the war and his role in it. There was a powerful tension in his character between different conceptions of himself. On the one side was the Christian, poetic self - sensitive, compassionate and romantic, in love with the works of Romantic poets, such as Keats and Shelley. On the other side was the soldierly self; disciplined, manly, ordered, heroic, stoical. Much of Owen’s best poet springs from this internal conflict.

Often in Owen’s poetry he is angry not so much at the nature or the war itself but at the way propaganda back home misrepresented the reality of warfare for the soldiers. A classic example is his poem Dulce et Decorum Est in which he accuses war propagandists of callously spreading the ‘old lie’ to ‘children ardent for some desperate glory’ that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. Clearly the soldier, whose thoughts and experiences are relayed via a narrator, in Disabled, swallowed the same lies and has come to bitterly regret his innocent credulity.

Restless shuffling
Throughout this poem Owen mixes structural regularity with irregularity. While a steady pentameter keeps the lines running in a generally iambic pattern, both the rhyme scheme and the stanza form change restlessly from one section to the next. At first things seem fairly regular in a first stanza of six lines and three pairs of full rhymes – ‘dark/park’, ‘grey/day’, ‘hymn/him’. The last is an example of ‘rich’ rhyme. Along with the slightly unexpected rhyme pattern – ABACBC – this last rhyme subtly suggests something slightly skewed or off key.

The second stanza has an extra line and immediately deviates from the rhyme scheme established in the first stanza. Some of the rhyme sounds are carried over from the first stanza, such as the first line’s ‘gay’, which has no rhyme pair in the second stanza, but echoes the B rhyme from the first, as well as the ‘dim/slim’ pair. The rhyme scheme of BDCDCEC introduces a triple rhyme – ‘trees/knees/disease’ and includes an unrhymed word, ‘hands’, again creating a subtle effect, here sonically underscoring the idea of a lack of touch or connection.

While the third stanza repeats the seven-line form, the rhyme scheme shifts again. This time there are no rhymes linking back to the previous stanza and the scheme shuffles a little to FGFGHGH. Surprisingly, in the following much longer, sixteen-line stanza, the rhyme pattern falls into a regular cross-rhyme scheme, so that the first and third lines are paired as are the second and fourth. This is more balanced and orderly stanza is succeeded by a much shorter tercet, with the middle rhyme then carried over into the next stanza – ‘fruits’/’institutes’. The poem ends in a couplet where the same end word is used instead of the sonic closure a full rhyme would provide. Like ‘hands’, ‘come’ is the only other word at the end of a line that doesn’t have a rhyme pair. This and the fact that the question remains unanswered, underlines the idea of separation and lonely isolation.

So what, you might ask. What is the significance of this unsettled, restless form? Well, the formal restlessness perhaps embodies the ill-at-easeness of the soldier, reflecting his agitated and unhappy state of mind. The underpinning of the pentameter meanwhile helps to maintain a sense of continuity in a poem that is composed of a series of fragments and could, otherwise, degenerate into bits and pieces. Psychologically, the metre arguably also suggests some enduring strength, an underpinning orderliness, a kind of backbone, a strong spine that helps the soldier to endure. Notably too, the most orderly and regular section of the poem is the stanza entirely devoted to the soldier’s fond memories of the past, before he was wounded in battle and then left afterwards to deal with the consequences of a lifetime of disability.

Now and then
Another important structural feature of the poem is how it is arranged in terms of time. While some sections, such as the first stanza, focus on the present situation of the soldier, others describe his past, while the last stanza looks forward to an unhappy future. The fond, vivid depictions of the soldier’s past life make his present suffering more poignant through stark contrasts. The unnamed soldier clearly is an everyman figure and the details of his past are common ones shared by many young men. In particular, he has a vivid memory of girls looking pretty and making flirtatious eye contact with them, ‘and girls glanced lovelier’, of the feel of their slim waists and the warm touch of female hands. He remembers too playing sport, being ‘carried shoulder-high’ after a victory at football, the cheers of the crowd after a goal and getting drunk in celebration. He remembers his vanity, his pride in his attractive appearance, the allure of an army uniform with ‘jewelled hilts/ For daggers in plaid socks’, the promises of camaraderie, the crowds cheering and seeing them off.

These vibrant memories of a happy, vigorous youth are bookended by his situation now in the present and by what is to come. Joie de vivre, vigour and dynamism have been replaced by a miserable, passive, sedentary existence, hollowed out of hope, goals and purpose. While the first stanza pictures him ‘sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark’ with nothing to do other to wait for sleep, the last outlines the bleak prospect of the years ahead:

‘… he will spend a few sick years in institutes…
And take whatever pity they may dole’.

And the poem concludes with a sense of frustrated helplessness as the soldier can only wait for someone to come and ‘put into bed’, like a child or an old man.