Discuss the Presentation of Personal tragedy in Disabled and Out, Out free essay sample

The Poems ‘Out, Out’ by Robert Frost and ‘Disabled’ by Wilfred Owen both contain many similarities and differences. Both poems tackle the issue of death and how precious life is, although they are from very different perspectives. Disabled has a much more personal approach to the subject as the story is told from a third person looking over the mans life, as opposed to in Out, Out where the narrator is detached from the characters, being an outsider. Out, Out tells of the events surrounding the death of the child whereas ‘Disabled concentrates on the effects of the mans segregation from his surroundings and the accident itself is not actually told. Wilfred Owen is the poet who wrote the poem ‘Disabled’ . He was making a point that if you are foolish enough to get yourself into things then you definitely have to be clever enough to get out of it. The young man in disabled wanted to be a soldier only because of the ‘fame’ you got with it. He goes about doing this by starting off very happily in the poem and as the poem progress’ he dims the mood and it suddenly turns into a deeply depressing poem. The most depressing line for me is when Owen says â€Å"and he will now spend six sick years in institutes and get whatever pity they might doll†. I think this is depressive because it is reflecting on the mans future and how it is going to be now that he has blown his legs off! Wilfred Owen wrote the poem in 1917 and intended on it to be written to give off a sense of tormented thoughts and recollections of a teenage soldier in the war. He wrote the poem to inform young men on how the war wasn’t glamorous at all but in fact if was actually life-threatening and gruesome. It also is written in first hand experience from when he was in the war and what he had seen in the war. This one poem was not just about one man who had foolishly gone out to war but it was a generalization to all the men who had gone out to war and lost their limbs. It shows a lot of irony in the poem of personal tragedy because he had lost his parents at a young age from war so it was a topic that was definitely very close to him. The next poem is ‘Out, Out’ by Robert frost. He is making the point that life is oh so valuable and that it can end at any one point, out of carelessness and foolishness. The situation in the poem is that there is a young man, we do not know his age but we can tell that he is a young teenager. The poem was written in 1916 and was based on the death of Raymond Fitzgerald, the son of a friend of Frosts, who died in the same way the little boy did in the poem. It shows a lot of irony in the poem as to how he died because of his friends sons death. The poem is trying to get across that sometimes doing the right thing will yet take your life, but you know you did good. and the ones who you thought cared, took it away for good. all in all, its not what youd expect. The titles of both poems illustrate how easy life is lost and how although the people in the poems are either dead or suffering their lives seem incomplete as ‘Out, Out’ is an unfinished quote from the play Macbeth and ‘Disabled’ shows that the term is not yet over. This seems to be the theme that both poems focus on, the pointlessness of the accidents suffered. Both of the accidents in the poems were rather foolish and could have been easily avoided. In ‘Out, Out’ it was the â€Å"Buzz saw† and in disabled â€Å"Some Cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer goal† and these two lines suggested a sense of suffering, either just before the accident or directly after. Throughout Out, Out the buzz saw is personified to sound like an angry, hungry animal. The poem seems to be loosely based around the boys connection with this saw and it is crucial to the poem. Words like snarled and rattled, give the reader a vicious image, which creates an uneasy feeling. In Disabled there is a very strong shift in time which emphasises the sense of regret, which is one of the important themes of the poem. The ex-soldier is feeling regret for joining the war and the irony of it is that he lied to be able to join: He asked to join. He didnt have to beg; Smiling they wrote his lie; aged nineteen years, The fact that he lied to make someone let him throw away his legs and his teenage years makes me feel very sad for the soldiers in battle. Owen wants to show the world that war brings nothing but misery and pain to us and that we should hold back from using violence. In Disabled, the sense of a lot of isolation is strongly present because of third hand perspective. He portrays a lonely man, waiting for dark. His life is so boring so he has a lot of free time feeling sorry for himself and pitying the helpless man he has become. His life has been planned for him without another option: Now, he will spend a few sick year in institutes And do whatever the rules consider wise War and fighting have left him helpless, alone and dependent upon others. If the poem was written in first person then the reader would be able to relate to the character more and therefore the sense of isolation and loneliness would die away leaving the poem without one of its strongest points. The structure of both poems is very different. In Out, Out the lines run continuously. There are no stanzas this could be to emphasise how none of the workers in the poem stop working after the boys death there is no consideration And they, since they were not the ones dead, turned to their affairs. Whereas in ’Disabled’ Owen cleverly links both visual techniques to create a particular setting. In the first stanza: waiting for dark, And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey Here Owen creates a sad atmosphere for the disabled man. We know from this opening moment that the man is waiting for his death and gives us a sense of doom. Mentally he is dead, though his heart still beats. He uses color to make the dismal effect because he says grey and dark. Both of the poets are trying to get across that accidents can occur very easy and sometimes they can be fatal. They want to get across that the value of life is ever so important to everyone and that your life could turn around in a batter of seconds.