This essay compares “Out, Out” by Robert frost and “Disabled” by Wilfred Owen. Frost’s poem is about a boy that dies after sawing his hand off in an accident and Owen’s is about a young man who gets amputated after sustaining serious injuries to his limbs during the war. While many of the themes presented in the poem are similar, their structures are different. Frost writes his poem in one stanza to show the suddenness of the boy’s tragedy. On the other hand, Owen’s poem is subdivided into stanzas that show different periods in the young man’s life. Nevertheless, both poems assert ideas about brevity and the fragility of life.
Both poems depict the loss of life where Frost focuses on actual death while Owen writes about the loss of the young man’s previous way of life. When the saw slips off the boy’s hand and injures him in “Out, Out”, his biggest worry is that his hand would be amputated and he would not be able to work but unfortunately, he bleeds out too fast and dies of shock. Owen’s main character does not die from his injuries although he is amputated and confined to a wheel chair. Consequently, he loses his popularity and independence and he feels dead inside as he cannot engage in the activities he used to before the war. He feels invisible as girls stare past him to the men who are “…whole”, which is ironic because he joined the war to impress a girl. He can no longer participate in life but can only sit in his chair and observe from a far. Even though he is still alive, he seems to be suffering a worse fate than the boy who died in Frost’s poem.
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Both Owen and Frost are able to depict the loss of social contact by showing the characters’ insignificance to others around them. The subject of “Disabled” is shunned when he returns from war severely injured and he receives no empathy. On the other hand, the boy’s death in “Out, Out” is quickly forgotten as everyone else “…returned to their affairs.” The poets allows the reader to empathize with the characters through pathos, by their use of language and imagery. One can vividly tell the emotions that were affecting each character due to the language used to describe it. The boy was scared to loss his hand as he would not be able to work without it, while the young man felt despair and self-pity as his injuries had reduced him to a nobody.
Both poems show how suffering and death can destroy joy and youth. In Frost’s poem, the boy had his entire future ahead of him and it was snuffed out by a single incidence. He died in fear as even if he had survived, he might have been amputated and spent his life dependent on others. Owen describes how war inflicts suffering and death upon young people and destroys their joy and youth. The wounded soldier is described as wearing a ghastly suit of grey, which is visual imagery highlighting his gloomy state of mind. The word ghastly connotes his distressing and grim state and the word grey which is a very dull color suggests his dull condition. While the young man joined the army for glory without thinking of the implications, he is confronted with the reality of the outcome and he is cut off from his community due to his disability.
The poems also present a loss of hope for the future. In “Out, Out”, Frost writes that the boy “…saw all spoiled” because the boy realizes that without his hand, he would not be able to continue with his duties and thus, he begged them not to amputate his hand. Here, the boy shows his desperate attempts to secure his otherwise doomed future. In Owen’s poem, the young man has already lost hope for his future as he has already seen how people treat his disability. In comparison to his glory days, he knows that he will never get his previous social status back. He has resigned himself to pity and accepting whatever help he can get and he says that he “ will spend a few sick years in Institutes” taking whatever pity they can afford him.
