He uses ‘you’ in this stanza frequently and you automatically put yourself in his position. He describes the ‘white eyes writhing in his face’, which makes you picture the dead mans ‘hanging face’ in your mind and you imagine what it was like to be there, to have witnessed that and what it must be like seeing things like that after the propaganda has told you how good it is in the war. ‘hear at every jolt, the blood’ you then imagine the noise; he uses your senses in this stanza to make it more realistic. Owen directly addresses the reader angrily in the end of this stanza using a definite tone. In this stanza he describes in graphic detail the sights and sounds and tells you not to tell the ‘old lie’ to young innocent children who are too naive to know the truth, ‘Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori’ which means it is sweet and fitting to die for your country.
This is the ‘old lie’. It is thought provoking. When we are telling children it is honourable to go to war, people are dying painful deaths and even worse, as Owen explains, people are witnessing them. The tone changes throughout this poem to reflect what’s happening. After reading this poem I was shocked but I felt that the man who went through this is using his experiences for good by telling people that war is not what they think. He exposes the truth behind the propaganda even though the memories may be painful for him.
Disabled, on the other hand is a lot more subtle and depressing than Dulce et decorum est because where Dulce concentrates on the battles and deaths and is situated on the battlefield, disabled tells the story of one man who survived but is disabled and because of that no one wants anything to do with him, to them he is just a freak. It is also situated in an institute where he is living out the rest of his life and concentrates on the aftermath of war. Owen helps the lonely image of the man by not naming him he is talked about in the third person, this way we don’t feel any attachment to him and I think this symbolises the man is of no importance, insignificant and no one acknowledges him. I think this is a very effective technique.
He is ‘Bent double waiting for dark’ this has a double meaning, one of which is that light and dark is the only change of routine that he has in the institute and the other is that he is waiting for death. He is described as ‘legless’ in the poem, which is a dehumanising description of his injuries and makes him sound like an animal. He hears the ‘voices of boys’ and it brings back memories of how he used to be. It is a distinctive contrast between him and the boys. This stanza describes his injuries and has a bleak sombre mood just as the first stanza in Dulce.
He was ‘so gay’, cheerful and merry ‘before he threw away his knees’ and now he’s blaming himself for doing so because he didn’t think, before he joined the army, what might happen. So he just ‘threw’ them away like a worthless piece of rubbish, devoid of a second thought. As a result of this ‘now he will never feel again how slim/Girls’ waists are or how warm their subtle hands;’
he feels that he is never going to have any physical contact again with anyone and these two lines are effective at showing how lonely he is. As a result of war he’s never going to be with another woman when the propaganda says that when you return all the women will love you because you will be a hero. There is also alliteration with ‘now he will never’, which emphasises the negative. This makes you feel sorry him because people ‘touch him like a queer disease’ and treat him like a freak; no one wants anything to do with him and all because he believed the propaganda. This stanza has a very strong contrast within it because its start off happy and ‘gay’, looking back on the old times and it quickly runs into a sad and depressing outlook on what his life is like now. It is very thought provoking because in this second stanza Owen shows how quickly these things can happen as he also does in the second stanza of Dulce.
He was once good-looking because ‘there was an artist silly for his face’. But ‘now he is old; his back will never brace;’ There is a comparison between these two lines. There is a change of pace and a contrast. He’s not really old but he is mentally old and is dying before his time. He is having flashbacks of how ‘half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race’. His life has passed quickly and it is very fragile. It has a nightmare quality because it could be you. This stanza has flashbacks just as the third stanza in Dulce but they are subtler in Disabled. This stanza shows how he has gone from a good-looking young teenager to someone who is old and dying in a very short space of time. It happened quickly and now it can’t be changed. Owen emphasises how fast it happened when he wrote a ‘leap of purple spurted from his thigh’, which I believe this means that the life jumped out of him.
This is the longest stanza of the poem and it contains many important points. ‘One time he liked a blood smear down his leg’. This is a cruel irony, once he thought it was manly to have blood on his legs but now he hasn’t got any legs. He was once ‘carried shoulder high’ and enjoyed the attention and wanted to feel important, now no one notices him. He’s the man with no name.
He had ‘drunk a peg’ when he joined up so he wasn’t thinking straight because he was drunk and it was non-committal.
He uses the punctuation effectively ‘-’, poignant, this is a caesura and he uses it to create a pause between two crucial statements in this stanza. He regrets joining and ‘wonders why’. Even now he doesn’t know why he joined. Also ‘someone had said he’d look a god in kilts’ and because he was vain something so petty as looking good in the uniform helped him decide to join. All in all he joined as a result of peer pressure, just ‘to please the giddy jilts’. ‘Smiling they wrote his lie’, he wasn’t even old enough to join but ‘Smiling’, this gives a slimy, sinister impression, they lied and said he was ‘aged nineteen’.
‘Germans he scarcely thought of’. He doesn’t even think about whom he’s going to war to kill, the fact that he had to kill people didn’t even enter his head when he was joining. This whole stanza shows how he joined without thinking about it and gave into peer pressure. He never even thought about the enemy and only joined out of petty reasons and now he is regretting it. This stanza made me think about how easily he fell into the trap of the propaganda and how important it is to think about things before you do them. The tone is of him looking back, like he is searching through his memories for a reason why he joined.
For him ‘no fears/ Of Fear came yet’ which means they came after. The reasons that he joined were for ‘jewelled hilts’ and ‘For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes’. This shows that he was thinking of the superficial things, which were created by the media, when he joined up for the army. Helping people never came into his thoughts when he was deciding to join up. When he left he was ‘drafted out with drums and cheers’ which made him happy and excited because he loved attention and being made to feel important. It gave him a sense of belonging. This stanza is there to tell us about how he felt when he was leaving for war and also to create a comparison with the next stanza. I think the tone of this stanza is of happy memories of how it was like at the start and how he wished it were all the way through.
It makes me think about how excited he must have been when he was sent off to the war. He enjoyed attention and I think he had a sense of belonging when he was sent off with ‘drums’ and
‘cheers’ so it is even more tragic when you remember what happened to him, just because he believed the propaganda.
He says that ‘some cheered him home’ but the welcome home was
neither what he wanted nor what he expected. It was nothing compared with what he had experienced when he left. ‘not as crowds cheer Goal’ he had a bigger cheer when he scored in a football match. He would’ve had more recognition and attention if he had carried on playing football and not joined the army. When he returned, only ‘a solemn man’ approached him and ‘thanked’ him and then ‘inquired about his soul’. He didn’t want the man to admire him and thank him. When the man ‘inquired about his soul’ it reminded him that he was dying. There is a distinctive change of pace between this stanza and the last. I think Owen wants us to see that people, who are disabled, as a result of wars don’t want people’s pity or their admiration, just a little recognition.
Now the rest of his life is going to be ‘a few sick years in institutes’, where he will ‘take whatever pity they may dole’. ‘pity’ is a patronising emotion but he will still take it because it’s the only emotion that people show him apart from disgust. It’s impersonal. He’s ‘noticed how the women’s eyes/ Passed from him to strong men that were whole’. Just because he is disfigured no one gives him a second glance, no one wants to be with him. ‘Why don’t they come/ And put him into bed? Why don’t they come?’ He feels that they have forgotten about him because he is insignificant. He has sunk into desperation because no one is coming for him. He is forgotten.
Dulce et decorum est and Disabled both contain an important message and both successfully crush the propaganda surrounding the war.
They are unique of each other in the way that they approach and tackle the false image that the media created of the war. Dulce on one hand was extremely hard-hitting while Disabled was a lot subtler; the message was still there but in a different way.
Dulce was made so hard-hitting by it being set on the battlefield, as it happens. Disabled though concentrated on the aftermath of war and on the reasons why he felt he had to join. It also give a little history of the man so we realise he has lost.
Dulce was more direct as it was written in the first person, so you feel as though you were there. Disabled is written in the third person which creates distance, which is a good idea as it isolates the man even more which symbolises how lonely he is.
In each of these poems the tone and the timing both change throughout. Dulce is on the battlefield, as it happens but Disabled contains flashbacks to different to different times in his life and shows his thought wandering. The tone in Dulce changes to reflect what’s happening at the time. Disabled changes constantly, but overall it is bleak and sombre.
The theme of both poems is the same but it is put in different style of writing. At the end in Dulce he directly addresses the reader, angrily and definite. Disabled has the same message but instead of telling you what you should and shouldn’t do it makes you think. The message is there but in a different way.
The characters in each poem are completely different. Dulce’s character is written about in first person narrative and the man who dies is anonymous, which I think symbolises how you don’t have to know some one to be permanently affected by their death. It shows that death can strike anyone. The man died by accident. Disabled though gave us a history of the character, so we knew a little bit about his personality and what he used to be like before the war. I think this shows us how much one person can be changed and how his life has been ruined just because he couldn’t say no.
