Wilfred Owen

 “Disabled” is about a veteran with a physical disability, telling his life story. Wilfred Owen’s approach to poetry helped people understand the reality of war because Owen’s poetry stresses the human cost. He stated that his subject was ‘the pity of war’. Auden’s “Refugee Blues” portrays the Jews, who were forced to flee when Hitler came power and they were rounded up and killed or imprisoned under the Nazi regime. Both “Disabled” and “Refugee Blues” have a main purpose, to feel evoke for the victims.

“Disabled” consists of seven stanzas, covering the past and present of the soldier’s life. The first stanza presents the pitiful figure of the injured soldier, now merely an observer of life around him. Already, the reader feels in a privileged position, because they have not had first-hand experience of what it is like to have such a traumatic experience, being an amputee, and the reader is merely an observer. We cannot help but see the link between the pity we feel and the pity doled out to the victim referenced at the end of the poem. Interestingly this is not the emotion that he longs for. We see early in the poem how much he enjoyed the attention of girls and the admiration of his teammates on the football pitch. The victim, now seated near a window, hears male children playing in the park, “saddening” him until sleep ‘mothered’ the voices from him. The reader has assumed, that the victim is saddened by the memories of past times, when he, too, would play in the park with his friends. The point here is to show his separation from society and to stress the effects of war by comparing his life before, and after injury.

In comparison, Auden’s “Refugee Blues”, also tells the reader about the victim’s misfortunes. WH Auden does what a blues songwriter would do, take a main theme and makes variations on it, leading to a distinct powerful final stanza. Each stanza intensifies the situation in the poem, with repeated rejection. ‘Say this city has ten million soul, yet there is no place for us, my dear, yet there is no place for us', from the line we are led to believe that the two refugees in this poem have been rejected by the vast amount of people in that city and probably by all in that country. The repetition of the words ‘yet there is no place for us' is the response of refugee to their hopelessness. It almost suggests disbelief.

A device Owen develops in “Disabled” to explore his ideas is the use of colours in the poem such as, ‘dark‘ and ‘gray’, which are both in the same semantic field. Both colours seem to symbolise death, disease and sorrow. The writer also uses the word ‘Purple’, to view life bleeding out of him through the wound he sustained during war. Owen has chosen this colour on purpose as it is also used to represent spiritual accomplishment and vitality. This loss of life results in the “suit of grey” but also the soldier sitting “in the dark” In “Refugee Blues” instead of colour, the writer uses of the weather. Auden uses the phrase ‘falling snow’ in the last stanza. Pathetic fallacy is used in the form of snow, because it is often associated with death and sadness; many people lost their lives in the snow and is used also to refer to the emotional coldness with which these people have been treated.