A young soldier who has lost his legs and his arms below the elbow, remembering the life he has lost and why he joined up, as he waits to be put to bed.
How Owen's experience of the First World War and its recruiting shape the poem, and how its contrasts of past and present, imagery and structure work.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark', 'Legless, sewn short at elbow', 'Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn', 'before he threw away his knees', 'All of them touch him like some queer disease', 'Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry', 'Someone had said he’d look a god in kilts', 'Smiling they wrote his lie; aged nineteen years', 'Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal', 'Why don’t they come?'.
Form: uneven stanzas that move between the present in the wheeled chair and his memories of the town, the football and joining up; contrasts of youth and age, cheering and pity; irregular rhyme; and the repeated question at the end.
Context: Owen's treatment for shell shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital in 1917, where Siegfried Sassoon encouraged him; his death a week before the Armistice in 1918, and his Poems published in 1920; 'the pity of War'; recruiting in the First World War, with posters, white feathers and pals battalions raised from workplaces and football teams.
Compares well with: Remains on what war leaves a soldier with; Drummer Hodge on a young soldier; Kamikaze on a soldier's return and rejection; The Schoolboy on youth that is wasted.
