It is obvious that Owen was confused by what he had seen, “Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ teeth wicked”. He could not explain in a definite sentence how these soldiers became what they were; instead he used language effects like alliteration to establish how the shell shocked soldiers behaved. “Stroke on stroke of pain” is a sibilance which slowed down the poem. It also gives a harsh sound to signify the non-stop artillery which happened in battle. The writer is telling the reader that one cannot imagine what these people were feeling. “lungs loved laughter” causes a sound of calm slurring to illustrate the groans of the mental as someone passed through them. It is a very affective approach in producing an image of motionless corpses groaning with madness. This quotation further emphasises the loss of thinking because they once enjoyed their lives only to be desecrated from war. The alliteration of “m” is used twice in “Mental Cases”: “memory…murders” and “multitudinous murders”. The sound which this affect produced was a murmuring noise, perhaps making the reader think that Owen was contemplating something like the beginning of a finished war. He used murders because their souls had gone and were now insane. With the quotation “heads wear this hilarious, hideous” the sound which is created from it when read out loud is one of panting and gasping. This might symbolise the noise of the shell shocked men, or even Owen was making a flashback of war on the front line with the image of a gas attack and soldiers trying to get air in their lungs. There is also an oxymoron in the sentence which shows that he was confused about why the men were in that current state of health. The most significant quotation which really makes the reader imagine what Owen would have seen is“Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses”. This image makes the reader think deeply about how much the shell shocked victims were disturbed by the war.
There are many words and expressions in this poem which were chosen to make sound and also to put an image into the mind of the reader. Often these words make the flashback of the battlefield in which the men became shell shocked from. The phrase “batter of guns shatter” is an internal rhyme that gives a machine gun fire sound showing pain to the reader. The whole quotation of “Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles” gives a sound of war description. It also portrays a very graphic incident of a person that was blown to pieces. It becomes apparent that in the second stanza that Owen is trying to work out why these men had become mentally unstable. In line fifteen he refers back to the thinking of the mental by saying; “Always they must see things and hear them”. The vital word in this sentence is “must” it shows that because of their state he thought that they always get shocked by the thought of war. The poet displays his anger in the poem; “Carnage incomparable, and human squander”. He detested the killing of lives and that included people who were no longer rational. Owen felt that if war never occurred the men “that had loved laughter” would had been healthy and young.
In the last line of the second stanza he came to the conclusion of what happened to the men he had seen; “Rucked too thick for these men’s extrication”. Owen thought that the problems had gone too far, such as seeing many deaths, for the men to escape from it. The poet knew that these shell shocked men were tortured as every minute went by, “still their eyeballs shrink tormented”. In “twilight” the men could cope because there were no flashes of light to distress them, the light might have symbolised the artillery and this would have meant that they did not want to go to war ever again; “Sunlight seems a blood-smear….Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.” The light symbolises the revisit of war for the shell shocked soldiers.
Throughout the poem there are dashes in the poem such as “-These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.” Each one of these sentences was written in a slightly different style to the rest of the poem; as if Owen was being shown round a ward full of victims of war by a doctor. In line twenty seven the poem says “Snatching after us who smote them brother”. Owen wrote this because he thought that the mad people were blaming the living (sane) for what had happened to them. In the last line it says, “Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.” This excerpt could have many meanings such as the shell shocked victims wanting revenge for those who made them turn insane. Further more, Owen is emphasising the pompous leaders as if they were the people inspecting the hospital realising what they had done. Of course, they had no idea of what “hellish” orders they “dealt” to those who fought in The Great War because they were not at the front line.
The whole idea of seeing mental people meant that Owen could not describe the situation in plain English, everything is described metaphorically. The whole impression of the mental people was that they were in a nightmare (Surreal) which they had not yet awaken from. He included the horror, pity and after effects of war to show the reader how “helpless” men could no longer cope with “Carnage incomparable” which meant that, in the end, they just broke down.
