To make this effect even stronger, he uses contrast. After describing the gloom, he mentions “voices of boys” and “play and pleasure”. Another example of contrast in this poem is that he was expecting “cheers” and “smart salutes”. However, when he returned back home, “only a solemn man” came up to cheer him home. The poem mentions that it was not as “crowd cheer goal”.
The writer uses the past tense a lot to make clear that before he went to war, things were good. This is made clear when it says that he “used to be so gay”. To make it clear that it was in the past he uses words like “before”, “last year” and “one time”.
It is obvious that the purpose of this poem is to tell young men to not go to war. To do this he uses men’s weakness: women. He describes how he used to be the hero at the local football team, “carried shoulder-high”. At the end it says that the “women’s eyes passed from him to the strong men that were whole”. It is ironic though, that the reason he joined the army in the first place was to “please his Meg”, and that she had said that “he’d look a God in kilts”. By describing that how he will “never feel again how slim girl’s waists are” and that they touch him “like some queer disease”, he is making young men think twice about joining the army, because they want to be seen at one of the “strong men who are whole” rather than “some queer disease”.
The poem, ‘The Hero’ uses language in a different way to achieve its purpose. Throughout the poem, the soldier and his mum come over as simple and common. When she folds up the letter, she says: “the Colonel writes so nicely”. She also says that mothers are proud of their “dead soldiers”. A more educated person might use the words ‘deceased’ or ‘passed away’ instead of “dead”, but this proves that Jack’s mother is only a simple common housewife.
It is also made clear throughout the poem that Jack wasn’t a very good soldier. He is described as “cold-footed” and a “useless swine”. It says that he had “panicked down the trench”. The main message in this poem though is that the army lies to families. The army officer had described him as “brave” and “glorious”, making his mother “proud” and shining with “ gently triumph, brimming with joy”. These “gallant lies” by the army are the complete opposite of how Jack is described.
Overall, I can say that ‘Disabled’ uses gloom, contrast and describing that wounded soldiers don’t get any women, to get across that despite the army seeming glorious, it isn’t. In ‘The hero’, Siegried Sassoon uses simplicity and contrast to make it clear to the reader that the army lie to boost morale at home. By saying at the end of the poem that “no one seemed to care” about the soldiers death, he also says that joining the army is not as glorious as it seems. He uses simplicity so the reader can relate better to the situation.
