The narrator in this three-stanza poem observes men in a mental hospital who suffer from what at the time (World War I) was called shell shock and now might be labeled post-traumatic stress disorder. In any case, they are insane; they relive the “batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles.”

For these tortured souls, “sunlight seems a bloodsmear” and “dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.” They cannot escape their hideous memories of the warfare. The narrator sees them as living in hell, and he accepts for all society the blame for what has happened to them–we, he says, have “dealt them war and madness.”

Wilfred Owen is recognized as the master poet of the First World War. Writing from firsthand experiences, both in combat and in a hospital recovering from battle fatigue, Owen gave us image after image of how horrible this war was — how the idealized notions of heroism and manly valor meant next to nothing when one was trying to survive gas attacks and bombs dropped from planes. Owen was killed a week before the armistice.

In this poem he opens with a series of questions about who these mental cases are, why they rock back and forth in some kind of purgatory, why they are so tortured with panic and misery. In the second stanza, he answers the opening questions: these are the men whose minds have been ruined by their war experiences, for whom the grotesque carnage of the war was “rucked too thick for these men’s extrication.”

In the final stanza, he explains why these men are so tortured by their memories. And, typical of Owen, he points out that everyone who supported the war contributed to the madness of these mental cases.

📖 Read the poem

The Poems of Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Edition: 1986
Editors: Jon Stallworthy
Place Published: New York

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).
Web image created by Medhum.org

As The Ghost Road begins, Prior has been cured of shell shock and is preparing to return to the front in France. Rivers takes care of his patients and his invalid sister, amid memories of his experience ten years earlier on an anthropological expedition to Melanesia (Eddystone Island). He befriended Nijiru, the local priest-healer who took Rivers on his rounds to see sick villagers and also to the island’s sacred Place of the Skulls.

Rivers entertains very un-British thoughts about the morality of these headhunting people, and about the power of symbolic healing. As these thoughts intrude upon his consciousness, Rivers is himself in the process of curing by suggestion a soldier with hysterical paralysis. Meanwhile, Billy Prior returns to the front. It is the autumn of 1918 and the last inhuman spasms of the war are in progress. In a futile battle that takes place a few days before the Armistice, Billy and his friend Wilfred Owen are killed.

To me The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize in 1995, is the most gripping and fastest paced of Pat Barker’s trilogy. The first two novels are Regeneration (1991) and The Eye in the Door (1993). As W. H. R. Rivers reflects on the culture of death on Eddystone Island, World War I, a culmination of the culture of death in Europe, grinds to a close, taking with it the poet Wilfred Owen. Of course, the characters in The Ghost Road are unaware of the new heights (or depths) that the culture of death will attain later in the 20th Century.

The Ghost Road
Pat Barker
Dutton, 1995
New York, 256 pages

Web image by  Claudio Carrozzo 

Mental Cases by Wilfred Owen

Carol Donley Aug 11, 2025

Owen’s stark poem portrays shell-shocked soldiers haunted by war, exposing both their torment and society’s complicity in their suffering.