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Wilfred Owen's Out, Out

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For my comparison and contrast essay, I have decided to choose Wilfred Owen’s “Disabled” and Robert Frost’s “Out, Out -”. I have chosen these because they both show loss in different ways and perspectives. One talks about the loss of a leg and that effect on him and the way that society treats him after this and the other is about the loss of a hand that then causes the loss of a life. One has a very precise structure of stanzas and rhyming meanwhile the other is more broad, free-flowing, has no stanzas and little rhyme.

In Disabled there are rhyming couplets every other line. In line 1 and line 3 there is a couple “dark” and “park”, Line 2 and line 5 rhyme “grey” and “day”. These rhyming couplets give the poem a certain feel as it creates a sense of flowing, this can be both to help the reader but also as a metaphor to the point that with his lost leg he can no longer do fun things, not doing fun things is causing his spirit to leave him slowly through the amputated. This is …show more content…
‘Disabled’ has a specific structure whereas ‘Out, Out -’ has a very abstract structure. In the Former there are seven stanzas this makes the poem slower paced, the gaps in the paragraphs allow the reader to catch their breath but also can be like the progression of time and every stanza in so many years later in time. Also in Disabled there is use of Iambic Pentameter, this is where the poem has 10 syllables this is shown here “Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park”. Iambic pentameter gives the poem a more formal and a more structured approach to portraying loss. The structure changes dramatically when you move to the next poem where the amount of syllables changes most lines. “His sister stood beside them in her apron” “To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,”, The first line here has 11 and the second has 10, this changes the way that the poem is spaced out and changes how the reader can read the poem due to no strict

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