Disabled and Refugee Blues, contrast and compare experiences
Disabled and Refugee Blues, written by Wilfred Owen and W.H. Auden respectively, are both responses to exile and isolation and a cry for those who are suffering from them. Disabled, written in 1917, was a response to the isolation caused by disability and especially that of war veterans. Auden’s, Refugee Blues, written in 1939 on the outbreak of the Second World War, was criticism of the widespread discrimination of Jews in Europe and more specifically German Jews by the Nazis. A key difference between the poems is, obviously, the different times that they were written in. Another, less obvious difference is that Refugee Blues was written with no personal experience and was written about a group from a country which he briefly experienced in a trip to Berlin 10 years prior to writing, in 1929. This is contrasted by Owen undoubtedly being influenced by his experiences at Craiglockhart Hospital where he wrote Disabled. This difference in influence could easily be one of many reasons for any contrast and variance in their depictions of the experiences of exile and isolation. Both poets expose the reality of isolation and exile, showing these experiences to be entrapping, unjust and revealing emotions of hopelessness and powerlessness.
Owen thoroughly explores the state of isolation as entrapping and inescapable in Disabled. Throughout the poem the tense almost involuntarily switches between the dreamy “light-blue trees” of “his youth” to the present, with the soldier’s flowing, nostalgic memories of the past always being truncated by the sharp caesura of the present. For example in the second stanza the rhythmic, fertile language of “girls glanced” and “glow-lamps budded” is broken by “before he threw away his knees.” The slow, graceful rhythm, which is produced by the alliteration and fertile language, is sharply broken by the short blunt sentence which instantaneously withdraws the reader from the lament and into the present. This represents the soldier’s
Owen thoroughly explores the state of isolation as entrapping and inescapable in Disabled. Throughout the poem the tense almost involuntarily switches between the dreamy “light-blue trees” of “his youth” to the present, with the soldier’s flowing, nostalgic memories of the past always being truncated by the sharp caesura of the present. For example in the second stanza the rhythmic, fertile language of “girls glanced” and “glow-lamps budded” is broken by “before he threw away his knees.” The slow, graceful rhythm, which is produced by the alliteration and fertile language, is sharply broken by the short blunt sentence which instantaneously withdraws the reader from the lament and into the present. This represents the soldier’s