{
 "id": "wilfred-owen/mental-cases",
 "title": "Mental Cases",
 "poet": "Wilfred Owen",
 "poet_slug": "wilfred-owen",
 "language": "en",
 "book": "Poems",
 "book_slug": "poems",
 "book_kind": "volume",
 "sequence": 4,
 "container": null,
 "epigraph": null,
 "first_published": {
  "year": 1920,
  "venue": "Poems (1920)",
  "note": "First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established.",
  "uncertain": false,
  "sources": [
   "https://archive.org/details/poemsowenwil00owenrich",
   "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1034"
  ]
 },
 "source": {
  "kind": "standard-ebooks",
  "repo": "standardebooks/wilfred-owen_poetry",
  "file": "poetry.xhtml",
  "upstream": [
   "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1034",
   "https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100547417"
  ],
  "rights": "public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931)"
 },
 "verification": {
  "level": "structural-only",
  "last_checked": "2026-08-12"
 },
 "stats": {
  "n_lines": 28,
  "n_stanzas": 3,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 53,
  "max_indent": 0
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ tongues wicked?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Stroke on stroke of pain⁠—but what slow panic,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Ever from their hair and through their hand palms",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Misery swelters. Surely we have perished",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "—These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Memory fingers in their hair of murders,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Always they must see these things and hear them,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Carnage incomparable and human squander",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Rucked too thick for these men’s extrication.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Back into their brains, because on their sense",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "—Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "—Thus their hands are plucking at each other;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Snatching after us who smote them, brother,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}