Previous Next

Language of Disability

A key motif in the first half of the poem is the pervasive use of language related to physical disability. From the poem’s very first line, the speaker emphasizes the deleterious effects war has on the body (lines 1–8):

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

The text in bold highlights the many instances in this passage where the speaker relies on the language of disability. It’s worth noting how the passage is constructed in such a way that the references to disability get increasingly extreme, which evokes a sense of the body’s gradual, physical degradation. The speaker begins with an image of soldiers who are “bent double” and “knock-kneed” as they trudge through the muck, exhausted to the point where they are essentially sleepwalking. In the second sentence, the speaker notes how bootless soldiers painfully “limped on” until their feet were “shod” in nothing but blood. Finally, in the stanza’s third sentence, the speaker describes the soldiers as so “drunk with fatigue” that they all become “lame,” “blind,” and “deaf.” Taken together, this language of disability emphasizes the brutal effects the war had on soldiers’ bodies as well as their minds, leaving them permanently altered.

Progressive Tense

Despite recounting a past event, the speaker uses the progressive tense to evoke a sense of present action and thereby emphasize the horrors of war. The progressive tense functions to describe events as they are currently taking place, as in the sentence: She is brushing her teeth. As this sample sentence shows, the progressive tense is formed with the verb to be plus a participle ending in -ing. In his attempt to communicate the horrific brutality of war, the speaker uses a wide range of -ing words that conjure painful images of suffering:

“haunting” (line 3)
“dropping” (8)
“fumbling” (9)
“fitting” (10)
“yelling” and “stumbling” (11)
“flound’ring” (12)
“drowning” (14)
“guttering,” “choking,” and “drowning” (16)
“smothering” (17)
“writhing” (19)
“hanging” (20)
“gargling” (22)

Taken together, the words on this list effectively communicate the chaos, confusion, and suffering of war. Even more significantly, they also evoke a feeling of urgency. This feeling of urgency is important for the speaker’s overall aim. Even though the events he describes have already taken place, he feels an urgent need to convince his contemporaries that war is neither glorious nor honorable. Men have died and will keep dying in horrible ways, and for this reason alone this war—and indeed all wars—must end.

Previous section Themes Next section Symbols

Take a Study Break