A friend has just sent me a link to one of the finest and darkest war poems ever written, “Disabled” by Wilfred Owen: http://www.englishverse.com/poems/disabled

“I can’t get enough of this poem,” my friend writes, “a sense of loss, probably for a lost cause. But bravery anyway. Once cheered on by the crowd but now abandoned  in his misery. Golgotha. Oremus.”

Here is my reply, comparing Owen’s brilliant poem with a poem by Siegfried Sassoon:

Owen’s “Disabled” is also one of my own favourite poems, which I have taught on several occasions. It is brilliant but marred by its nihilism and despair. I always teach it side by side with Siegfried Sassoon’s poem, The One-Legged Man (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-one-legged-man-2/), which treats the same theme but from a more positive and hopeful perspective (though the sting in the poem’s tale is the tragic irony of the last line).