In what ways do Owen and Frost make you feel pity for the characters who have suffered disability in their poems?

Owen and Frost both show characters in their poems who have suffered physical injury. Owen’s Disabled is about a teenage soldier who goes to war having lied about his age, and returns disabled, forgotten by those around him and tormented by thoughts and recollections of his past life. Frost’s Out, Out- tells the tragic story of a boy who accidentally cuts off his hand using a saw and then dies in an operation; the rest of the community then return to their own lives without a second thought for the boy. Both poets depict the tales of innocent boys whose lives are significantly changed by injury, which is shocking and sad. Frost illustrates the fragility of life in the title “Out, out-“, which is taken from Shakespeare’s’ Macbeth: “Out, out, brief candle!” because it suggests that life is delicate like the flame of a candle and that it can be snuffed out quickly. Owen’s choice of title reflects society’s perspective of injured soldiers who return from war because it suggests how they are labelled by those around them. Owen and Frost both make the reader feel pity for the characters through the presentation of life as fragile, the sense of lost youth and innocence and the comparison of their lives before and after the incidents. In both poems life is shown to be fragile, which is pitiful. Owen presents this using grotesque imagery: “half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race, and leap of purple spurted from his thigh”. The word “spurted” creates a violent effect and alongside the words “lapsed” and “race”, it emphasizes the instantaneous, unnatural speed of the loss of life. In Out, Out- too, the injury is described as being quick: the boy “swung toward them holding up the hand… as if to keep the life from spilling”. The word “spilling” has a sense of the uncontrollable, which highlights how life is presented as wasted in the poem. Both poems also present an extreme sense of change. In Disabled, Owen’s use of the colour “purple” contrasts with “dark” and “grey” which have connotations of death to suggest that war has drained him of the happiness that he used to have in his life. Frost also presents this idea in the phrase: “He saw all spoiled” because “spoiled” has connotations of destruction and at this point in the poem, Frost marks the life-changing moment when “the boy saw all”. Destruction is presented in Disabled too in the phrase “threw away his knees”, suggestive of rubbish and waste because the action of throwing something away is easy. This is poignantly reflected in the description: “He’s lost his colour…Poured it down shell-holes until the veins ran dry”. “Poured”, as with “spilling”, presents life as something easily and quickly lost in both poems. In Out, out- Frost presents life as fleeting in the phrase “little-less-nothing!” because the caesuras reflect the suddenness of the accident and “little” evokes a sense of delicacy. Through this presentation of life as delicate in both poems, Owen and Frost make the reader feel pity for the characters.