Literary Criticism of 'Disabled'

1. Disabled (title)
Owen remarks in a letter to Sally Owen (14th October 1917) that he
showed this poem to Robert Graves who had come to Craiglockhart to
visit Sassoon. Owen was struck by the fact that Graves was very
impressed by the piece.

In mid-1918 Owen drafted his famous Preface to a proposed collection

of poems (never published in his lifetime) which apparently he intended
to call 'Disabled and Other Poems' (thus emphasising the importance of
the piece in his eyes). Fussell (1977) notes that the poem strongly
echoes Housman's poem 'To an Athlete Dying Young', whose patriotic
enthusiasm for war is strongly attacked by Owen:

…a poem in which Houseman has also made certain

that we see and admire the boy's eyes, ears, foot,
head, and curls. Owen's former athlete, both legs and
one arm gone, sits in his wheelchair in a hospital
convalescent park listening to the shouts of "boys"
playing at sunset. He can't help recalling the
excitement of former early evenings in town before
the war, back then "before he threw away his knees".

GWMM, P. 292

2. 'He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark' (L.1)

The immediate appearance of 'dark', 'grey' , and 'shivered' sets up the
isolation of the wounded soldier. It strikes a strong comparison to the
warmth of the second stanza.

3. 'used to swing so gay' (L.7)

The next few lines mirror the elegiac tone of such poems as 'The Ruin',
an Old English poem, in which the poet (anonymous) looks on a ruined
building, now frost-bitten and decrepit, imagining the sound and
warmth that once rang through its walls.

4. 'glow-lamps' and 'girls glanced' (L.8 & L9)
Both are linked effectively by the use of alliteration.

5. 'before he threw away his knees' (L.10)

The implication that this was a needless loss (sacrifice) is reinforced
by Ll.23-4 where the wounded soldier fails to remember why he joined
up, pointing only to a distant sense of duty, and euphoria after the
football match. Fussell notes that: Owen's favourite sensuous device is
the formula 'his - ', with the blank usually filled with a part of the
body. (p. 292).
6. 'Now he will never feel again how slim/Girls' waists
are' (L.11 & L.12)
Showing not only the physical loss of his arm, but also the psychological
scars as the soldier knows he will be shunned by women from now on.

7. 'younger than his youth' (L.15)

The reversal is total. The implication is that his face is now older than
his youth.

8. 'He's lost his colour very far from here' (L.17)

C. Day Lewis cites this line as an example of one of the great
memorable lines written by Owen. It is an example of deliberate,
intense understatements - the brave man's only answer to a hell which
no epic words could express...more poignant and more rich with poetic
promise than anything else that has been done during this
century. HFP, P.17

9. 'spurted from his thigh' (L.20)

Clearly a parody of sexual ejaculation. Owen uses erotic language at
this point but referring to blood instead of semen. The irony being that
here we have the loss of life (the soldier loses his limbs, and his senses)
as opposed to the creation of life. The sexual imagery plays on the
continual point that his injuries, resulting from his enlisting in order to
please his girlfriend and other admirers (ll. 25-6), has resulted in him
being abhorrent to women.

10. ' a bloodsmear down his leg,/After the matches, carried

shoulder-high' (L.21 & L.22)
Again Owen uses irony effectively here. We are already aware that the
soldier has lost an arm and his legs, yet here we are told that before
the War he felt proud to have an injury (albeit obtained on the football
field), and to be carried shoulder-high (for reasons of celebration as
opposed to helplessness). The concept of reversal is again used:
sporting hero to cripple, handsome to 'queer disease' (L.13), colour to
dark, warmth to cold.

11. 'a god in kilts' (L.25)

An indication that the soldier was a member of one of the Scottish
regiments (repeated in ll.32-6). This also implies that the soldier joined
up for reasons of vanity.

12. 'giddy jilts' (L.27)

A Scottish term for a young woman.

13. 'Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years' (L.29)

The sadness of the soldier's plight is heightened. Clearly he was under-
aged when he enlisted and therefore is still young.
14. 'Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal' (L.37)
Recalls the image of the football match earlier. L.22 implies that he was
carried from the field shoulder-high, possibly as the result of scoring
the winning goal. Here, despite having achieved far more, for far
greater a loss than a 'blood- smeared leg', the crowd's reception is
more hollow.

15. 'do what things the rules consider wise' (L.41)

The soldier's passivity is complete. The fine young athlete has been
reduced to a state of dependency on others and helplessness
(heightened by the pitiful closing repetition of 'Why don't they come?').
The stanza has him waiting for others to do things for him, he 'spends a
few sick years', 'takes whatever pity' others choose to offer him; he is
passed over by the women's attentions, as he bemoans the cold and
hopes that someone will put him to bed.

16. 'Tonight he noticed how the women's eyes/Passed from him to

the strong men that were whole' (L.43 & L.44)
Repeating again the loss of the soldier, this time in his attractiveness to
the opposite sex. 'Whole' implying that he is incomplete, less than a
man. Ironically he is now dependent on young women to put him to
bed, in contrast with his prewar virile manhood when he could expect to
take women to bed.SPP, P.215

17. '...Why don't they come' (L.45 & L.46)

Dominic Hibberd has noted that this line can be linked to the recuiting
poster of 1914, 'Will they never come?' (see 'Some Contemporary
Allusions in Poems by Rosenberg, Owen and Sassoon', Notes and
Queries August (1979), p.333. Several recruiting posters used the motif
of linking sport to the army, and there were numerous recruiting drives
at soccer matches.
“Remembrance” Emily Brontë (1846)
“Remembrance” is a fascinating poem, both as a precursor to E mily Brontë’s famous
novel Wuthering Heights (1847) and in its own right. The original manuscript, dated
March 3, 1845 (when Brontë was 26), had as its title “R. Alcona to J. Brenzaida.”
Rosina Alcona and Julius Brenzaida were characters in the imaginary world of
Gondal, which Emily and her younger sister Anne invented and peopled with
characters and narratives (this was one of the two imaginary worlds that the Brontë
siblings invented and explored). It took its present form with the 1846 publication of
Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë).
The imaginary provenance and unlikely dating (15 years earlier, when the addressee
had died [l. 9], the real Emily would only have been 11) make it clear that this does
not depict—or if it does, only in a highly mediated fashion—a true loss on Emily’s
part, but the poetic imagination of such a loss. Much of it is more or less standard
issue: the sense of unappeasable loss, the memory of a time that cannot possibly be
reclaimed, and the risks entailed in such a memory: The speaker “dare not indulge in
memory’s rapturous pain” (l. 30) lest she lose all contact and agency within the world.
But the extraordinary moments are the ones where she sees—as Catherine and
Heathcliff do in Wuthering Heights—that loss brings one into deeper regions than
possession could possibly have offered. The poem is an earlier version of Catherine’s
impassioned avowal to Nelly about Heathcliff, “If all else perished, and HE remained,
I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the
universe would
turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. . . . My love for Heathcliff
resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.
Nelly, I AM Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more
than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being” (Wuthering Heights,
chapter 9). Heathcliff is alive when Catherine says this, but its truth even beyond the
grave is confirmed when, despite her death, she and Heathcliff continue to haunt each
other. So, too, the speaker of “Remembrance” can describe an existence strengthened
without the aid of joy, cherished, she implies, because it lacks joy (ll. 23– 24)—that is,
the “visible delight” that Catherine abjures, an existence sustained in opposition to the
emptiness of the world that does not contain her dead lover. She can say, like
Catherine saying, “I am Heathcliff,” that his tomb is “already more than mine,” which
carries her identification with him or with his state to hyperbolic extremes. These
moments are extraordinary and make this into a very nearly great poem, and they
make us take seriously (as Wuthering Heights will do preeminently) the speaker’s
conversation with the dead. She speaks to a man who has been dead for 15 years and
seems not haunted by him but able to sustain the intensity of relations with him. This
is because they have both given up the joy of life but maintained, over the boundary
of life and death, the bare existence of a life deprived of joy and which must therefore
exist since only what exists can be deprived of joy. Brontë will repeat this logic in “N o
Coward soul is mine”; it is the logic of the sublime, whereby the increased intensity of
affect produced by loss ratifies the sheer existence of what has been lost rather than
denying that existence. For Brontë, this was literature’s primary quality.

Bibliography
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Gezari, Janet, “Fathoming ‘Remembrance’; Emily Bronte in
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