Owen stated that his chief concern was “War, and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity.” Wilfred Owen’s “Disabled” is inspired from a real life tragedy during World War I; a soldier whose life was drastically changed after the monstrous war. Owen encountered various instances like these when he was hospitalized in Craiglockhart Hospital. Several of these injuries aggravated due to lack of adequate medical care. Wilfred Owen depicts the typical picture of the disabled where “people with disabilities are more dependent, childlike, passive, sensitive, and miserable” than their nondisabled counterparts, and “are depicted as pained by their fate.” (Linton, 1998, p. 25).
The man appears to be in a stagnant condition, on a wheelchair. His reference of the passing time is not action, but the changing hues of day and night as he waits for the dark. He waits for the dark, as he has nothing productive to do. Darkness may also be a symbol of death , that what his vegetable existence longs for. His ghastly suit of grey does not offer him much protection as he shivers in it. The happy voices of the boys in the park come across as a melancholic hymn to him, as his perception of life is distressing as his life is.…
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