Trauma in Owen’s Poetry

“World War I broke out on a largely innocent world, a world that still
associated warfare with glorious cavalry charges and noble pursuit of
heroic ideals” (Mahmud, 2008). Many were wildly unprepared for the horrors and
everlasting trauma of the trench warfare, and it inevitably wiped out a whole generation
of young men and shattered so many aspirations and ideals. No other war challenged
existing conventions and standards in the same way as World War I did. It saw the
creation of many weapons of mass destruction (such as heavy artillery, bayonets,
bandoliers and tanks), the use of poison gas, and trench warfare; all of which resulted in
the massive loss of human life. The four-year struggle shook the entire world and seemed
to mark the end of a phase of civilization. Profound psychological scars were embedded
in the souls of the survivors and took the lives of many, some of who would never see the
end of this terrible cataclysm. The desolation felt by Wilfred Owen during this time was
reflected in the poetry of those years and detailed the brutality and erroneous slaughters
that occurred in an era where fighting for one’s country was still considered to be heroic.
Involved personally in this war, he was specially gifted to express the experiences of
those horrific and trauma-filled years in his poetic techniques whilst simultaneously
expanding the world of poetry for those studying his works. As attested by The Center for
Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation, trauma is “the unique individual
experience of an event or enduring conditions in which the individual's
ability to integrate his/her emotional experience is overwhelmed and the
individual experiences a threat to his/her life”. In this essay, the theme of
trauma will be explored in Wilfred Owen’s poetic compositions ‘S.I.W’, ‘Disabled’ and
‘Mental Cases’.
In the poem, ‘S.I.W’, Owen explores the traumatic experience of war by rendering a
soldier who is driven to suicide. The title is a prelude to understanding the poem’s
content and ultimately Owen's purpose of composing this poem. Lengthened, S.I.W
represents ‘self-inflicted-wound’ and as the title suggests, the poem encapsulates a young
soldier who deliberately self-imposes a damaging wound to avoid any further suffering
on the battlefield. Owen’s perspective is that of an objective observer, and illustrates the
pressure being exerted upon the young man through three avenues: the inescapable
horror of battle, his militaristic duty to his country, and his demanding father who would
rather him dead than in discharge. Within the first stanza, Owen captures the soldier’s
feeling of despair through an observation-based simile in lines 15-16: ‘Courage leaked,
as sand…best sand bags after years of rain’. Through this device, Owen cleverly compares
a well-made sandbag to a fortified and skilled soldier. Much like the best made sandbags,
even the soldier had a limit to his tolerance, and all the training and bolstering of spirit
could not prevent the seams of his sanity being abraded by the war. The years of rain
represent the incessant barrage of death and destruction. His resolve liquefies like sand
leaking from a bag in the face of the seemingly infinite war. This device is also presented
in a scholarly essay written by Kenneth Simcox (Poetry Critique- 2001) who states: “Part
3 is The Poem, and there is "poetry" also in the latter (lines 13-18) that reveals the
mental and physical state of the man. Lines 15-16 show a marvelous observation-based
simile, and although with "the hunger of his brain", we cannot be sure of the precise
insight we are being offered, the effect is clear enough”. The second device the poet
implements is that of imagery, which is scattered throughout various instances in the
poem. Owen talks of a ‘slow grazing fire, that would not burn him whole’ (line 5 of The
Poem), producing a vivid picture of a fire which burnt flesh, making the entire process
more tortuous. The word ‘grazing’ implies a leisurely, deliberate attempt to inflict pain,
as if the fire was savoring the soldier’s discomfort. The last image Owen gives the reader
is that of ‘Tim smiling’ (line 2 of The Epilogue), which is suggestive of the gory visage
which a soldier wore after being shot in the mouth with his lips blasted into a grotesque
smile. In this last image, Owen forces the gruesome picture of the dead soldier onto the
reader to demonstrate the fact that the soldier could only find content in death. In a
contribution made by an anonymous person (Genius 2017), they state that ‘Owen uses
imagery to paint gory pictures of the war to shock the audience and erase completely
the image that fighting for one’s country is an easy feat. The ‘fires that would not burn
him whole’ is his longed for but elusive death. This accords with the Medieval vision of
hell where fires burn but fail to consume. Owen seems to be standing back, preferring
not to judge, but only to explain. It seems that the poet was present to witness what
happened, and it is left for the reader to judge. His family will believe that he died
satisfied, glad to defend his country. In reality, he died miserably to escape’. Lastly,
Owen uses symbolism in his poem, for example in line 2 of The Prologue (‘He’d always
show the Hun a brave man’s face…’). The Hun (slang for the Germans in ‘war-talk’) is
presented as a vague, unreal concept, as if not human. The ‘brave man’s face’ symbolizes
the delusions of the population early in the war; that their sons were heading for glorious
victory. According to CrossRefInfo (2018), ‘ ‘The Hun’ is the term used by those on the
home-front to disparage the enemy; it makes them a homogenous entity, rather than
individual German soldiers. Tim tries to live up to the common idiom to ‘put on a brave
face’ until the point when he can no longer bear to.’ In S.I.W, Owen's poetic styles and
techniques are effective methods of conveying his purpose, and the reader is left with a
strong sense of Owen's condemnation of war, and possibly with a hatred towards it
themselves. It is one of his more shocking poems, but the public would have come face to
face with the inescapable trauma of warfare, and the pressures heaped upon the soldiers
to defend their country.
Contradistinctive to Owen’s treatment of trauma and suicide in ‘S.I.W’, the link between
disability and trauma is examined in the poetic work, ‘Disabled’. In most of his poems
Owen maintained a passionate dislike for armed conflict, however, after a period of time
his focus shifted from the battlefield to individual victims of war. Owen's purpose became
to illustrate the intense suffering of those victims, and to demonstrate how the war had
ruined their lives. ‘Disabled’ is a poem with one such purpose. Within the poem, Owen
paints a poignant picture of a young soldier, removed from the battlefield ‘legless’ and
‘sewn short at one elbow’. In the poem, the persona of the young soldier reflects upon
what he was before the war, and what the war has left him with, or rather, taken from
him. He is described as having energy and vitality in his pre-war days, the warmth of this
memory starkly contrasting with the isolation he finds himself in upon his return. The
use of contrast continues throughout the poem, with the most striking being the
juxtaposition of his life before and after the war. The readers see that just a year ago, the
soldier was accustomed to being the life of the party, and having a flock of lovely girls
surrounding him at all times (as corroborated by lines 7-10: ‘About this time Town used
to swing so gay…in the old times, before he threw away his knees’). Now, these are just
mere recollections or memories as he bitterly remembers that he will never get to
experience a relationship with a woman from now on since they treat him as if he has a
‘queer disease’ (line 13). Additionally, he was used to having people gawk over his
handsome features (line 14: ‘There was an artist silly for his face, for it was younger than
his youth, last year’). However, the harsh reality is that the war has definitively halted the
happiness of his previous life, made him age way beyond his years and inadvertently
sucked out all the life of him (line 15: Now, he is old; his back will never brace, he's lost
his color very far from here). This argument is further substantiated by an analysis by Ali
T who succinctly expresses: ‘In the second stanza, the soldier reminisces about the old
days before the war. He conjures up sights and sounds of lamps and dancing girls
before he remembers that he will never be the same because everyone scorns yet pity
him at the same time. Because of this, the soldier feels emasculated, ignored, almost
betrayed by women. In the third stanza the recollections continue, with the soldier
musing on the happy days of yore. He used to be young and handsome and an artist
wanted to draw his face. Last year he possessed youth, he says, but he no longer does’.
Owen evokes pity and sadness in his audience through his use of descriptive or figurative
language and vivid images. The imagery in the poem is certainly very marked from the
beginning. The persona "sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark"(line 1); a picture which
evokes pathos twofold in the audience. Darkness is normally equated with the sinister,
the absence of light, but for this man, it is clearly a relief, which evokes pity and curiosity
in the reader. All is not as it should be with this man. It soon becomes clear why, as Owen
states, with cutting abruptness, that his body was "legless, sewn short at the elbow" (line
3). The lack of elaboration here forces the reader to picture vividly the limbless man in
the chair. Another instance used to promote imagery is in the second stanza wherein the
persona refers to the old times ‘before he threw away his knees’ (line 11). Only a very
negligent individual would ‘throw his knees away’, however the boy did not commit this
folly, rather, it was committed for him. He was brainwashed into thinking that he would
‘look a god in kilts (line 26). He also joined the fight in order to please those around him
and be looked upon as a brave figure. In a publication made by Study Rocket (2018), the
author states ‘Owen implies an image that the man was physically fit: a footballer who
once, ironically, enjoyed a ‘blood-smear down his leg’. However, he is now crippled and
a double amputee. This broken figure represents an image standing for the destruction
and aftermath of war’. Owen makes extensive use of repetition, the last two lines of the
poem demonstrating this: ‘How cold and late it is? Why don’t they come…why don’t they
come?’. This repetition equates to monumental depression and the anxiety the persona is
feeling as he waits for somebody to put him to bed and allow him to obtain eventual
relief. The pitiful image of the young man, dreaming of his warm past in a cold lonely
room is a haunting one and there is a sense of desperation in the voice of the narrator.
The fact that the nurses are not attending to the soldier is reflective of how nobody will
care and look after the injured. He will be forgotten about. This statement written by
Emily Dickinson in ‘Disabled-An Analysis’ sums up this entire device and she states: ‘The
repetition of the rhetorical questions hints at an element of insanity and desperation in
the man. The rhetorical questions could also be seen as a euphemism for the man
crying out to die and be relieved from the torture of his life.’ In Disabled, Owen looks at
the cosmic experience of war, and conveys to the reader the horror of the individual
battle which continues long after the primary conflict of World War 1.
In a similar manner to ‘S.I.W’ and ‘Disabled’, the issue of trauma is investigated through
the poetic presentation of post-traumatic stress disorder and mental disability in ‘Mental
Cases’. As with much of Owen's poetry, ‘Mental Cases’ focuses on the horrors of war, and
in particular the ongoing psychological effects of wartime trauma. Owen based the poem
on his own experiences, where soldiers were often sent for recovery from ‘shell-shock’
(now known as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD). Using grotesque, visceral
imagery, this poem builds a picture of life as a kind of living hell for soldiers returning
from the battlefield, their bodies and minds irrevocably ravaged by the horrors they
witnessed. Owen uses metaphors throughout the poem. He calls the men ‘purgatorial
shadows’ (line 2) of their former selves, reduced to ghostly figures. They are caught
between life and death, heaven and hell, in purgatory, a place of temporary suffering.
Except, as stressed by the hopelessness in the poem and the length of stanza, nothing
suggests a cure. Their suffering will continue as they relive the horrors of the war. It
could imply they have sinned because of the killings they were made to carry out under
orders. This emphasizes their dehumanized appearance; they look dead, no longer
belong in the world of the living, and are ‘shadows.’ (line 2). This idea is reinforced in the
analysis published to the Wilfred Owen Association and states ‘It is through his use of
metaphor that he attains shock from his audience; if he merely planned to alarm the
reader, he could mention in simple terms the mental effect on these soldiers, however,
by utilizing metaphor he explores their mind in a much more visceral, provoking and
sensory manner. The reader is taken aback by the words that Owen utilizes, however
the genuine shock is basically validated through his use of metaphor. The reader feels a
deeper sense of simply how horrific the scenario is for these soldiers.’ Owen also uses
personification to make their living nightmare real. He describes their minds as those
‘the Dead have ravished’ (line 10), a vivid image with Death taking everything from them,
gorging on their suffering and taking sustenance from it. By personifying this, their
suffering becomes physical as well as mental, and the pain they suffer feels like it was
brought about by an act of aggression. The sibilance of ‘stoke on stroke of pain’ (line 5)
emphasizes that their misery is on-going. The two ideas seem almost paradoxical; a
stroke should be something loving and tender, but instead it is repeated to show the
monotony of never-ending suffering. This idea is further reinforced by an article
published on CrossRefInfo which states: ‘Owen’s use of personification in Mental Cases
contributes to the sense that the men are haunted by figures from the past. The idea
that ‘the Dead have ravished’ their minds suggests that their dead comrades have
seduced them rather than destroyed them. They are incapable of getting Death out of
their heads. Ravished has an archaic meaning of capturing, raping and carrying
someone off; the more modern usage is of being captivated and bewitched. There are
reasons for Owen using both meanings of the word’. Lastly, the poem uses alliteration
throughout. This device helps to intensify the horror of the poem, with the relentlessness
of the poem's sounds bombarding the reader much like the men's traumatic memories
bombard them in the hospital. By essentially turning up the volume on the poem,
alliteration also makes the grotesque images at hand stand out all the more starkly. It is
highlighted in the second stanza with ‘murders, multitudinous murders’ (line 12) and
brings our attention to the number of lives that have been lost. Calling them ‘murders’
highlight the soldiers’ obsession, something they cannot rid themselves of. The ‘set
smiling corpses’ (line 24) are forced to appear to the world as normal with a ‘hilarious,
hideous, awful falseness’ (line 25) that Owen derides. In an analysis by Peter Jackson
(2017), he says: ‘These lines, not coincidentally, are about all the "murders" that replay
in the men's minds. The alliteration itself—all those /m/ sounds—reflects that
abundance. In the same stanza, "lungs" and "loved laughter" alliterate, connecting the
men's joy to their delicate physical bodies—to those blood-leaking lungs’. Not once in
“Mental Cases” does Owen talk about the physical wounds of war; he was far more
preoccupied with the irrevocable mental scars it left. Using the structure and language of
the poem, Owen shows the readers the terrible consequences of war and blames those
who sent the men directly to the war, making them confront the idea they are ultimately
responsible for these “Mental Cases.”
In summation, Wilfred Owen masterfully renders various aspects and effects of trauma
through the vehicle of various literary devices in ‘S.I.W’, ‘Disabled’ and ‘Mental Cases’.
Through analyzing the above range of poems, it becomes clear that over time Owen's
purpose matured and shifted focus. However, one thing that remained constant in
Owen’s poetry was his prominent style and techniques that helped to promote each
respective purpose. The poem ‘Disabled’, through its unorthodox structure,
communicates to the reader the despair of an individual war victim. It encapsulates the
theme the best since it focuses not only on the disability of the soldier, but also on the
mental deterioration of the soldier because of the trauma he endures after he was
discharged. However, the behaviour of those around him worsens this trauma and
plunges him deeper into the darkness which will no doubt overcome him entirely
sometime in the future.