Mental Cases

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Mental Cases is one of Wilfred Owen's more disturbing works. It describes war torn men suffering from Post-traumatic stress disorder, otherwise known as shell shock.

    Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
    Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
    Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
    Baring teeth that leer like skulls' teeth wicked?
    Stroke on stroke of pain,-but what slow panic,
    Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
    Ever from their hair and through their hands' palms
    Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
    Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?

    -These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
    Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
    Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
    Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
    Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
    Always they must see these things and hear them,
    Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
    Carnage incomparable, and human squander
    Rucked too thick for these men's extrication.

    Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
    Back into their brains, because on their sense
    Sunlight seems a blood-smear; night comes blood-black;
    Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.
    -Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
    Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
    -Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
    Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;
    Snatching after us who smote them, brother,
    Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.

This poem uses extreme imagery, such as 'Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter' and 'Wading sloughs of flesh' .

The opening of each stanza of this poem calls up the structure of the King James Version of Revelation 7.13-17: "What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?...These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of God."

Owen wrote this poem to show the world what happens to the survivors, to show people that war is so evil and sick that no man should ever have to go through it. At the time of writing this poem, long term effects were not considered when men were sent to war, so the poem also informed the public about the mental effects war can have. Dulce Et Decorum Est and Anthem for Doomed Youth deal with the horrors of war itself but he also wrote poems, such as this one, to show the aftermath. While this poem describes the mental effects of war, Disabled shows physical consequences.

In this poem Owen says that these men's minds have been distorted by the horror they have seen and to them, 'sunlight seems a blood smear' and 'Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.' Most people see dawn as a sign of new beginning, but the men in Owen's poem will forever be tormented by such things.

Wilfred Owen uses rhetorical questions in the poem - "who are these?", to directly address the reader and give an impression as if he was directly talking to you. His use of the word "brother" in the last line of the last stanza attempts to give the poem a more personal view, and it creates a slight feeling of discomfort.