Explore "Poems: Mental Cases" by Wilfred Owen on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight? / Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows, / Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish, / Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicked? / Stroke on stroke of pain, -- but what slow panic, / Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets? / Ever from their hair and through their hand palms / Misery swelters. Surely we have perished / Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?
-- These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished. / Memory fingers in their hair of murders, / Multitudinous murders they once witnessed. / Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander, / Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter. / Always they must see these things and hear them, / Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles, / Carnage incomparable and human squander / Rucked too thick for these men's extrication.
Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented / Back into their brains, because on their sense / Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black; / Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh / -- Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous, / Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses. / -- Thus their hands are plucking at each other; / Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging; / Snatching after us who smote them, brother, / Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.