Objective: Making Note Pages

This is the beginning of a body paragraph about the feelings Owen portrays in the poems.

In both poems, one emotion that is shared is the feeling of pity. Owen makes the reader

sympathise for the soldiers and, by doing so, makes us aware of the physical and mental
consequences of war. Particularly, this is done in the beginning lines of 'Disabled' and
'Mental Cases'. In 'Disabled', Owen introduces his audience to a lonely 'he' who is 'sat in a

wheeled chair waiting for the dark'. This sense of loneliness is repeated in 'Mental Cases',
when the speaker of the poem beginnings with the questions 'Who are these? Why sit here
in twilight'. Both opening lines share the idea that these men are cut-off from normal

life,

sitting in darkness and waiting for their death. Thus, we, as the reader, through the use of

the anonymous pronoun 'he' in 'Disabled' and the equally ambiguous collective pronoun

'these', feel pity towards the soldiers because we do not know who they are, what caused
their madness and what will become of them. By making the readers feel pity, Own makes

the reader more sympathetic towards for veterans of war, particularly people who read his
poems today. Additionally, the repeated imagery of darkness in both poems, represented by

the metaphor 'waiting for dark' (death) and 'twilight', suggests the lives of the soldiers in the poems are starved of Iitrallife.

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