Many of Owen's poems discuss the physical and mental sufferings of soldiers during World War I. In perhaps his best known poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est", Owen contrasts the nobility of war as seen in the poems of Horace with the reality of trench warfare. He achieves this contrast by using vivid physical imagery of death, dying, suffering, and mutilation. The most dramatic imagery is that of the effects of mustard gas on a soldier:
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Many of Owen's poems discuss the physical and mental sufferings of soldiers during World War I. In perhaps his best known poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est", Owen contrasts the nobility of war as seen in the poems of Horace with the reality of trench warfare. He achieves this contrast by using vivid physical imagery of death, dying, suffering, and mutilation. The most dramatic imagery is that of the effects of mustard gas on a soldier:
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
... blood .... gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs ...
A poem that blends discussion of physical and mental effects of war is "Disabled", describing the thoughts going through the head of a disabled veteran who has lost legs and an arm in the war and is now watching people as active and athletic as he once was, and feeling bitterly depressed about his fate and about the way he is now treated by the able bodied.
Owen's poem "Mental Cases" discusses ex-soldiers who suffer from what we now would call post-traumatic stress disorder or what then was called "shell shock". Owen describes this phenomenon more poetically as:
These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
... Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles...
In the poem, he shows these men constantly reliving the horrors they have witnessed in the war and unable to function outside an asylum.
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