"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. Owen based the poem on his experience of Craiglockhart Military Hospital, near Edinburgh, where he was invalided in the summer of 1917, suffering from shell shock. It has a death imagery. The poem describes the void and emptiness that soldiers feel.
Short Analysis
In the first Stanza it starts off with multiple questions. “Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?” Wilfred starts off with a querying tone emphasizing on the words who, why and wherefore. This could show how men would think after the war, while having a mental breakdown and trying to figure out what happened. The second stanza goes on to describe the soldiers sensations and how their memories are filled with people they have witnessed killed or people they killed themselves. It gives some visuals such as "Treading blood from lungs that had once loved laughter" and "Batter of guns, shatter of flying muscles" which creates powerful mental images of chaos and suffering.The third stanza describes how those who survived the war live now with shell shock, relating bloody images (Bloodsmear, blood-black, wound that bleeds afresh) to the common stages of a day (sunrise, night, dawn)References
Mental Cases Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA