I chose Wilfred Owen’s poem “Mental Cases” because it forces me to confront the psychological devastation of war in a way that feels immediately unsettling. Owen does not allow the reader to look away. He shows how soldiers carried the war inside them long after the fighting ended. The poem mattered to me now because I kept thinking about how impossible it must have been for anyone to truly “survive” an experience that reshaped their minds. Reading it at the end of the semester felt appropriate because many of our course materials asked us to examine the human cost of violence, trauma, and the war systems that rotted men from the inside out. This poem felt like a clear reflection of those themes. I paired it with an image of an empty No Man’s Land because that abandoned and ruined landscape mirrors the inner emptiness Owen describes. It becomes a visual version of the mental void the soldiers lived with.