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Mental Cases
An analysis by Rose Garofano

Overview
 Written in 1918 – Owen captures the damage to men's
minds as a result of war. The damage was not more
shameful than bodily wounds, however the after effects
of war didn't always find ready acceptance at that time,
and MENTAL CASES is both a powerful poem and a
propaganda document. Owen's aim is to shock, to
describe in stark detail the ghastly physical symptoms
of mental torment. As in DULCE ET DECORUM EST,
Owen shows men in their prime become senile wrecks.

Stanza One
 The subjects of the poem are objectified by the opening
references to ‘these’ and ‘they’. Their humanity has
been stripped from these unnamed patients and the
abruptness of the opening rhetorical question
challenges the speaker’s companion to define them as
well as confronting the reader with his interrogatory
tone. Their nameless state makes them
representational of those whose mental capacity is
shattered by their wartime experiences.

 The querying tone of ‘Who’, ‘Why’ and ‘Wherefore’
demand a considered response, triggering reflection on
the casual relationship between the horrors of war and
mental breakdown.

 The archaic language of ‘Wherefore’ lends Biblical
weight to the moral implications of their condition.
These ‘purgatorial shadows’ rock in a metaphorical
hellish existence, their mannerisms and tortured visage
to envisage their dehumanised appearance cause by
‘Drooping tongues’ and slavering jaws.

 Value-laden diction and word inversion heightens
the impact of the repellent image of hared teeth and
aggressive manner, ‘teeth that leer like skull’s teeth
wicked?’ The simile links the living with the dead,
emphasising their separation from normalcy as well as
hinting at how war has made them ‘wicked’. This also
stresses the menacing and disorienting impact of their
leering expression.

 Repeat active verbs in the phrase ‘Stroke on stroke’ of
pain are given greater impact by the sibilance which
stresses how each has been one of a succession of
emotional wounds that has led to their condition. The
oxymoron of ‘slow panic’ makes us focus on the
accumulated emotional stress of what they have
suffered. What they have witnessed and done has
‘Gouged these chasms’ around their ‘fretted sockets’.

 The descriptive impact of ‘Gouged’ and ‘fretted’ making
us imagine the cadaverous appearance of their faces
now pared down to the skull’s bony extrusions. Their
inner torture is given tangible features in the caverns of
their faces. ‘Misery’ is personified, sweltering from hair
and sweaty palms.

 The caesura in the second last line makes us pause to
picture the scene before Owen concludes, ‘Surely we have
perished/Sleeping, and walk hell: but who these hellish?. He
can identify with a soldier’s hell but their extremity of mental
breakdown betokens an inner place so horrendous that
‘sleep’ itself has perished. Mental anguish is their purgatorial
existence, a fate far worse than death itself for the emotional
anguish that first caused their condition is relived endlessly
in a cycle that cannot be relieved or stopped. The run-on
lines and inclusive use of ‘we’ links the speaker with the
subjects while emphasising that their pain is far worse.

Stanza Two
 The opening lines give some response to the questions
of the first stanza. The unknown ‘these’ have been
identified as those whose minds have been ‘ravished’.
This forms a link with the idea of sleep having been
‘perished’ as another assault on the senses. The
ravisher is death itself, personified and capitalised as
the cause of what has happened to these men’s minds.
Wars ‘Dead’ have attacked their psyches, making them
another casualty of war. They have been robbed of
innocent slumbers, now plagued by nightmarish recall.

 Owen borrows a Shakespearean phrase (allusion)
from Macbeth, to emphasise the mass death these
men have been forced to witness. ‘Multitudinous
murders’ is made more ominous by ‘death’ in war being
equated with murders, repeated in lines 2 and 3. The
accumulated effect of the harsh alliterative ‘m’ in the
second and third lines makes the reader share the
speaker’s shock at what is before him. This allows
them to make the connection between the horrific
slaughter ‘they once witnessed’ and what they have
become.

 Macbeth allusions continue in the image of ‘Wading
sloughs of flesh’ which is more disconcerting than the
Bard’s reference to seas of blood. The murder
committed by this war has become a quagmire of
destruction. This conjures up images of the physical
terrain and the level of destruction that made the
landscape a muddy mire made up in part of mangled,
trampled bodies.

 Empathy is developed by references to ‘these
helpless’ who are doomed to forever ‘wander’ this vile
landscape. Their path is uncertain but circulatory. High
modality is used in the final four lines to emphasise the
ongoing hell these helpless men endure. Word
inversion and reference to the senses of sight and
sound, ‘Always they must see these things and hear
them’ and the horrors they have witnessed for they
have been utterly debilitated by them; their lifeline to
normalcy completely severed.

 Rhyming terms ‘Batter’ and shatter’ confront the
reader as does the image of ‘flying muscles’ as men’s
bodies are ripped apart. This is the ‘Carnage
incomparable’ that has cursed these men, Owen’s
word inversion once again demanding that we
acknowledge their fate and recognise its bloody cause.
Life has been squandered, as has their mental health
for the hellish sights they have seen have been
‘Rucked’ serves as an effective image for the
convoluted and war-torn terrain, thick with the dead in
which they lived and fought.

Stanza Three
 The undeniable causal relationship between war and
insanity is made with the opening (diction) ‘Therefore’.
Placement of the word ‘tormented’ at the end of the opening
line effectively emphasis their suffering. They have lost
visual contact with the outer world as they focus instead on
an inner sight fractured by pain and death. They have
withdrawn into an inner hellish place which mars and
besmears everything else. Blood imagery is effectively
developed through the compound words, ‘blood-smear’ and
‘blood-black’. The impact is increased further by the ‘b’
alliteration and the negative connotations of ‘smear’ and
‘black’.

 Neither ‘Sunlight’ nor ‘night’ impinges on the world they
live in for ‘Dawn’ heralds no rebirth, repair or
redemption for them. They exist in a twilight world
where each new day merely beckons more of the
same, opening ‘like a wound that bleeds afresh’. Theirs
is a mental wound that festers and weeps and never
heals.

 Another conclusion is reached, pre-empted by the
(diction) ‘Thus’ which shows the speaker’s insightful
grasp of what he is witnessing. Once again, alliteration
is used to make the reader acknowledge this gruesome
sight of these heads forced to ‘wear this hilarious,
hideous’; leer. Antithetical ideas of humour and horror
jar our equanimity, making us a helpless companion to
the person who wanders amongst such men.

 The extended metaphor of these patients as living
corpses, begun in the opening stanza is concluded in
the final stanza by their description as ‘set-smiling
corpses’. The ‘falseness’ of their appearance emphasis
that they have been dehumanised. The final four lines
have a sermonistic tone as if we are being directly
addressed to recognise our culpability in the fates of
these men. We recognise our representative
involvement through terms such as ‘brother’ and ‘us’.

 Their frenzied actions, ‘plucking’, ‘picking’, ‘snatching’ and

‘pawing’ (verbs) are easily envisaged as is the mental
incapacity that underscores them. They are scourged by
‘rope-knouts’ of society’s making that ‘dealt them war and
madness’. Biblical allusions with archaic terms such as
‘smote’ and Owen’s use of a self-flagellation motif that
shows that responsibility cannot be readily abrogated
elsewhere. War, which is madness itself, was waged with
such men as its cannon fodder and for the social
endorsement of that we all stand indicted. There is a social
responsibility for what has befallen ‘these hellish’, ‘these
helpless’ and ‘these things’.

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Mental Cases

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