"Mental Cases" is one of
Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC (18 March 1893 – 4 November 1918) was an English poet and soldier. He was one of the leading poets of the First World War. His war poetry on the horrors of trenches and gas warfare was much influenced by ...
's more graphic poems. It describes war-torn men suffering from
post-traumatic stress disorder
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental and behavioral disorder that can develop because of exposure to a traumatic event, such as sexual assault, warfare, traffic collisions, child abuse, domestic violence, or other threats on ...
, otherwise known as
shell shock
Shell shock is a term coined in World War I by the British psychologist Charles Samuel Myers to describe the type of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) many soldiers were afflicted with during the war (before PTSD was termed). It is a react ...
. Owen based the poem on his experience of
Craiglockhart Military Hospital, near Edinburgh, where he was invalided in the summer of 1917 with
neurasthenia
Neurasthenia (from the Ancient Greek νεῦρον ''neuron'' "nerve" and ἀσθενής ''asthenés'' "weak") is a term that was first used at least as early as 1829 for a mechanical weakness of the nerves and became a major diagnosis in North A ...
, and became the patient of
Dr A.J. Brock. Using imagery of death and violence, Owen presents a chilling portrait of men haunted by their experiences.
Short analysis
The poem adopts a questioning tone initially, with the speaker asking “Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?” Owen uses this to present the men almost as strange
carnival exhibits to be inspected or wondered at, emphasised by the base pronoun "these". They are depicted as grizzly, fascinating creatures, which seem "hellish" to the speaker.
The second stanza goes on to depict memory as a cruel monster which tortures their minds, forcing them to relive the "Carnage incomparable" they witnessed. Owen's chilling contrast between "Treading blood" and "lungs that had loved laughter" echoes a regular theme in his works, that the men who gave themselves for the war had once been amiable and friendly people before the dead "ravished" their minds.
The third stanza describes how those who survived the war live now with shell shock, in that scenes from the battlefield insert themselves into everyday life; sunlight is a "blood-smear" on a window, then night falls "blood-black" - they cannot escape the sight of blood. The macabre tone of the poem is added to by the image of hallucinations of "set-smiling corpses", describing the "hilarious, hideous" faces of the patients as they remember. Typically for Owen, he concludes with blame; it was "us who smote them", and "dealt them war and madness"; this echoes the ending of Owen's most famous poem, ''
Dulce et Decorum Est
"Dulce et Decorum est" is a poem written by Wilfred Owen during World War I, and published posthumously in 1920. The Latin title is taken from Ode 3.2 (''Valor'') of the Roman poet Horace and means "it is sweet and fitting". It is followed by ...
''.
References
http://www.slideshare.net/rgarofano/mental-cases-analysis
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mental Cases
British poetry
World War I poems
1918 poems
Poetry by Wilfred Owen
Post-traumatic stress disorder