I have been fascinated by the portrayals of disability throughout the class, so I found the sudden and stark acknowledgment of disability in Owen’s “Disabled” to be particularly poignant when considering other mentions of disability throughout the literature. The title itself is evocative–neither conjuring images of blown apart men, nor attempting to dampen the impact of what disability means; it simply acknowledges the reality for the man the speaker traces the story of.

Particularly in Not So Quiet, Nellie speaks about the desire for “whole” men, dismissing the men disabled or by war to the same state of otherness that she feels as a nurse. She denies them their sexuality and gender as men (arguably as a trauma response, but, hey, ableism is still ableism). Owen’s speaker talks of the man’s past loves, how alive and youthful he used to be, and contrasts them now with his disability, and, indeed, age, though his age is never given and likely not all that old. He speaks of women’s waists and hands, allowing us to see a glimpse into the humanity of a now infantilized, both impossibly old and impossibly young man, who is not without continual desire for closeness and intimacy. In the last stanza, in a strange, prophetic turn, the speaker begins to trace the future of this disabled man, seeing the continual pity and loss of humanity that will overtake him, as Nellie sees it, but doubly describing the pain of seeing women’s eyes gloss over him to favor other men. In a description not dissimilar to the opening stanza, he begs for someone to put him to bed in a way that is both desiring intimacy and acknowledging the child-like, sexless role he has been condemned to as a disabled man.

I feel that, in the literature we have read, sexuality in relation to disability is never touched on except to say that survivors of war are undesirable. And though this poem traces a similar thought of infantilization and disability, it places the disabled man at the forefront.