Comment on the presentation of pity in Wilfred Owen's war poetry.

For Gilbert, Owen’s conception of pity is “not merely sentimental”, but “elicits terror as well”; such terror is manifest in Owen’s frequent images of the horror of war. For instance, Mental Cases, written whilst Owen was at Craiglockhart hospital, transposes Dante’s 14th century depiction of Hell in Inferno to the “purgatorial” qualities of the hospital ward. In drawing both on past pieces of literature and archaic diction throughout the poem, with the visitor questioning “Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows…?”, Owen gives a sense of these “Mental Cases” being pushed into a past from which they cannot escape. In Exposure even nature seems to conspire against the soldiers, with “Pale flakes with fingering stealth…feeling for [their] faces”, the fricative alliteration lending the words a harsh, invasive quality. However, Owen does not merely describe the horrors of war, but “re-presents it”. Mirroring the disorientation of the soldiers, Owen’s frequent use of pararhyme allows him to blur the line between fiction and reality, notably between “hall” and “Hell” in Strange Meeting. Even the transition from “snow-dozed” to “sun-dazed” in Exposure has a hallucinatory quality; we move imperceptibly from cold to warmth, just as one might flick through images in dreams, or nightmares. Yet, for me, the most vivid of Owen’s horrors is the infamous closing image of vengeance that ends Mental Cases. The frequent adverbs that punctuate the front of each line, “therefore…thus…thus”, gives Owen’s verse an internal logic that permits no middle-ground and that culminates in the accusatory “snatching after us…/pawing us who dealt them war and madness”. With the hammering iambic stress falling on “us” it seems that the sound of the words themselves carry the burden of guilt; the guilt that these “purgatorial shadows”, these “mental cases” are “scourg[ed]” for the sin committed by all who are complicit in war. It seems that the pity of war is very much bound up with its horrors.