The poems language is very clever and contrasting in itself in some places. For example, “blood - smear down his leg” implies that he was full of life and enjoyed playing sports, not caring about losing a bit of blood from a scratch. “He's lost his colour very far from here”, this could either mean that the disabled soldier lost his colour in his face, meaning that the soldier, at that point was feeling very unwell and faint. However, “poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry” makes the reader think of the fact that as blood is essential, it is almost life draining to lose a large amount of blood after losing a limb on the battlefield. Also, in the third verse, there is a contrast in two consecutive lines, “For it was younger than his youth, last year. Now he is old, his back will never brace.” This is a before and after comparison and gets the reader to consider the happy man before the war and the depressed man that was left as a result. In lines two and three, there are alliterations – “sewn short” and “ghastly suit of grey”, this shows the situation of this man and how it cannot really get any worse.
“Disabled” consists of many similes, an example is, “all of them touch him like some queer disease.” This refers to the girls that used to find him attractive and now that the man has no legs and one arm, there seems to be something wrong with him. The girls get the idea that the disabled soldier is contagious in some way and the girls avoid him like a disease. The disabled man must have been a ladies man back in his day.
The poem ends on a very gloomy depressing note. It exclaims that the man hasn’t got much time to live and in his state he doesn’t have much to live for. He is lonely, this is shown in the first and last stanzas, when the man has to be put to bed and no one comes to help him. Also when he is sitting on his own in his wheelchair waiting for dark. This makes the reader feel pity for the man and this means Owen has achieved his aim, to make the reader feel the pity of War and its victims. The repetition of “Why don’t they come?” shows the feeling of this man, as the girls do not want to come to see him anymore, and that was the reason he went to war to gain more attention.
Peace by Rupert Brooke was Brookes first ever sonnet. Brooke actually saw little combat during the war; he contracted blood poisoning from a small neglected injury and died in April 1915, in the Aegean. Brooke's reputation, aside from the myth of the fallen "golden warrior" that his friends set about creating almost immediately after his death, rests on the five war sonnets of 1914.
In the first of the five war sonnets from which Brooke gained the majority of his fame, the word ‘war’ is not mentioned even once. Instead, Brooke talks about the release from pain, grief and “a world grown old and cold and weary” which is death. Death is personified as the key to “cleaner life” and the poem is begun by the thanking of God who has “wakened us from sleep”.
Wilfred Owen is against the thought of war; this is expressed in all of his poems as he brings across the consequences of war in his poetry. Owen creates a lot of pity in his poems; it works well in war poems. Rupert Brooke was for the war but eventually towards the end of his writing career sees the consequences and suffers the aftermath of war and dies at an early age. The only outcome of war poetry is that war can only have devastating effects on people’s lives.
