Disabled - Wilfred Owen

The poem ‘Disabled’ written by Wilfred Owen conveys the idea of life before a person enters war as a soldier and arrives back home with horrendous flashbacks of the encounters that he has experienced.

Firstly, war requires a terrible price to be paid. In Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Disabled’, Wilfred explains how he lost his personality and independence after losing his leg in war. Wilfred Owen writes in the poem “He lost his colour very far from here”, describing how his cheerful personality left him . Wilfred Owen uses Ambiguity in this line explains how he lost his place in society. Wilfred Owen uses rhetorical questions to represent how much isolation he had,‘how cold and late it is! why don’t they come and put him into bed? Why don't they come.

Secondly, the poem questions society about war and the way we treat all soldiers who have returned from war disfigured and disbanded from themselves both past and present. We with no respect, treat them differently to others who are normal and stay the same. In the past, and still to this day the people of society walk around war heroes that have lost their leg, arm or even their thoughts not knowing what do with their lives. Wilfred Owen makes an account on how some girls touch disabled soldiers like a ‘queer disease’ simply meaning that they want to exclude them or isolate them from society of the healthy and normal.

In addition, war is horrible, and a dreadful event no matter which way we can put it. War is war and it is horrific. Losing parts of your body that you can only have once and having visions or flashbacks about the horrors that they saw on the battlefield. Throughout the poem Wilfred Owen used imagery to describes a soldier who lost his leg by writing this, “A leap of purple spurted from his thigh, one like he had blood smear down his leg”. It gives us imagination of exactly how it looked like and felt like in a soldiers perspective of losing a leg.

In conclusion, war makes soldiers lose their personality throughout all the horrendous events that happen in conflicts and with that makes them different and isolated from the normality of living within society both past and present.