When the Jew goes to the consul:
“The consul banged the table and said;
'If you've got no passport, you're officially dead'”
His next hopeful try was the committee:
“Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year”
And then he attends a public meeting, who don't even acknowledge his presence:
“Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
'If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread'”
Auden uses contrast in the way each authority handles the discrimination to show the reader the extremes and makes each visit conclude in the same negative way to prove that the situation is helpless and that the Jews can't help themselves to the basic human rights they should have.
Auden also uses contrast between the lives of the Jews and the lives of the Christians to represent the extreme discrimination faced by the Jews. 'Refugee Blues' builds up contrast from the first stanza which says:
“Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes.”
This makes me feel the injustice of the situation. A human being should have a place in their own country no matter what they believe. He also compares the way the Germans treated the Jews to the way they treated their pets:
“Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in;”
This means that the Germans thought the animals were more worthy then the Jews, who are humans just like them. He also uses contrast to show the envy he feels towards other 'free' animals:
“Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:”
Not only does he envy fish, he also envies 'the birds in the trees' who have 'no politicians and sang at their ease'. He wishes that he could be as free and carefree as these fish and those birds so close to him. He wishes that humans were as peaceful. This convinces the reader that the world would be better at peace.
In 'Disabled' there is a very strong shift in time which emphasises the sense of regret, which is one of the important themes of the poem. The ex-soldier is feeling regret for joining the war and the irony of it is that he lied to be able to join:
“He asked to join. He didn't have to beg;
Smiling they wrote his lie; aged nineteen years,”
The fact that he lied to make someone let him 'throw away his legs' and his youth makes me feel very sympathetic for the soldiers in battle. Owen wants to show the world that war brings nothing but misery and pain to us and that we should refrain from using violence. He is promoting peace using his own 'weapon' – poetry.
Owen and Auden display different emotions using different perspectives. In 'Disabled', the sense of immense isolation is strongly present because of third narrative perspective. He portrays a lonely man, “waiting for dark”. His life is so boring so he has a lot of free time feeling sorry for himself and pitying the helpless man he has become. His life has been planned for him without another option:
“Now, he will spend a few sick year in institutes
And do whatever the rules consider wise”
War and fighting have left him helpless, alone and dependent upon others. If the poem was written in first person then the reader would be able to relate to the character more and therefore the sense of isolation and loneliness would die away leaving the poem without one of its strongest points. The poet makes the character seem forgotten and taken for granted:
“How cold and late it is! Why don't they come
And put him into bed? Why don't they come?”
'Refugee Blues' is written in first person perspective to help the readers build a connection between them and the Jews in that era. It makes the reader share the feelings of the poem; sad, helpless, vulnerable and sympathy builds up furthermore. It is also written in first person because it is like a speech, from one loved one to the other, stating their bitter reality:
“But there's no place for us, my dear, but there's no place for us”
He focuses on someone close to him to relate to, but it could be interpreted on a large scale basis and seen as something he wrote for all the Jews, whether he knew or not, to emphasize the fact that they were not alone in this situation, although he still gives us a sense of the frightening secrecy of it all.
Owen cleverly links both visual and aural techniques to create a particular setting. In the first stanza:
“... waiting for dark,
And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey”
Here Owen creates a dismal atmosphere for the disabled man. We know from this opening moment that the man is waiting for his death and gives us a sense of doom. Spiritually he is dead, though his heart still beats. He uses colour to make the dismal effect because he says 'grey' and 'dark'.
So aural techniques are used to emphasize the ugliness of the situation. Owen portrays the ugliness of going to war using unpleasant sounds, like the 'g' sound in the first stanza. He sits in his 'ghastly suit of grey' waiting for something 'in the dark'. If the poet changed this line to 'there was a man sitting in a grey suit in the dark' it would definitely not have the strong effect it has on the readers. It intensifies the thought of isolation and loneliness.
Darkness also gives the perception of the loneliness, a feeling an unwanted ex-soldier would have when abandoned by those who once cheered him on when he made the decision to go to war:
“And soon, he was drafted out with drums and cheer”
Just one line has a vast amount of contrast: 'drafted out' means compulsory but with 'drums and cheers' is an uplifting phrase.
With Auden's poem, 'Refugee Blues' assonance is used throughout the poem because 's' resembles whispers which create an effect of secrecy:
“Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.”
Auden chooses to use many of 's' sounds to show the reader that the Jews, at this point in Germany, did not II didn't have the right to speak and voice their opinion. Unfortunately, the world has not moved forward because even in 2009 we still do not have freedom of speech, not even in the West. Evidence to this statement is that denying the Holocaust is a crime in 13 Western countries.
The one aspect not mentioned above is imagery but it is present in many of the techniques that are mentioned. Imagery is present throughout both poems to help visualize something one has never seen or ever experienced. These two poems teach us about how two people write about different themes yet hit one main point; war is a terrible, atrocious thing to engage in. Adjectives and adverbs that describe things create imagery. In 'Disabled' colours set the mood and atmosphere and the image of a man alone in the dark is very powerful:
“He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
And shivered in his ghastly suit of gray”
He also created an image of his beautiful youth which he enjoyed a lot more than he gave it credit:
“ When glow-lamps budded in the light blue trees
And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim”
His life went from being light to dark, and Wilfred Owen’s abilities to illustrate and colour a painting with words are magnificent. He shows us that even when it was dark, his life was one of a happy young man, but now his life is as dark as can be and there’s nothing he can do about it.
Is war a good or bad thing? In the eyes of the majority of human kind, war has been nothing but a bad fingerprint in the hands of humanity. Mankind has learnt about the horrors and consequences of war, yet it still continues to happen. War is merely the massacring of one’s sibling, and it leaves a soldier in a nightmarish state of mind. What griefs me most is that there are civil wars all over the world. We all know war causes economic disasters, displaces people, makes thousands of children orphans, makes thousands of women widows and kills thousands more men in the battlefield, so why do we still continue to fight and kill? Will humans ever learn to create harmony with each person’s differences or will advanced technology encourage violence furthermore?
