'FUTILITY' BY WILFRED OWEN
WILFRED
OWEN: ‘FUTILITY’
Move him into the sun—
Gently
its touches him once
At
home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France.
5 Until this morning, and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think
how it wakes the seeds, -
Woke,
once, the clays of a cold star.
10 Are limbs, so dear achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved
– still warm – too hard to stir?
Was
it for this the clay grew tall?
-
O what made
fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
POET’S
BACKGROUND
Wilfred Owen was born in
Shropshire on 18th of March, 1893. After his secondary education,
Owen was admitted to the University of London where he studied. Being young and
energetic when the First World War began, Owen enrolled in the British Army in
order to fight in defense of the country.
Owen who indeed is a veteran soldier
who fought with a deep sense of commitment and responsibility. He was a poet
renowned for his lucidity and graphic presentation of his thematic concern.
Owen specifically states his concern as a poet in the preface to a book of
poetry he was about to complete before his tragic death. ‘My subject is war and
the pity of war. He died on November 4,
1918, exactly a week to the Armistice.
Wilfred Owen’s collected
poems were posthumously published by his soldier friend, Siegfried Sassoon, in
1920. Because Owen is still highly regarded as a war poet, there are different
editions of his collected poems.
BACKGROUND
TO THE POET
The poet, himself is a
soldier in the First World War, gives a poetic brief of his experience of the
death of a fellow soldier at the battlefield. Here, the poet laments the death
of a soldier-hero (a cold star), his now fallen, cannot raise his once active
limbs; now cannot be woken up by the touch of the kind old sun. the poem does
not only lament the death of a fallen soldier but it also laments the fact that
war maims and wastes away lives, without really solving the problems of man. (Futility)
In the main, the poem is
concerned with the vanity of life, hence man is referred to as a mere clay; it
is also about the horrors of war.
THEME
The subject matter of this poem is futility, and it uses the futile attempt of the sun at waking up a
lifeless man, or having any effect on him to articulate some themes. Among
these themes are that life is vain and that inherent in war are calamities
and tragedies; that war causes diversion of attention from constructive
activities because the soldiers leave at home ‘fields unsown’ and clamoring
for cultivation through their ‘whisper’, to answer the call of the battlefield.
The poem also carries other themes that war does more harm than good, and that
death puts an end to all the activities of every man.
The poem tries to lay bare
the realities of death and destruction that normally accompany a war.
Therefore, it seeks to advise that war should be avoided as much as possible.
FORM AND
STRUCTURE
Owen’s ‘Futility is a
14-line poem, hence, a sonnet. It is divided into two stanzas of seven lines
each. The poem has a unique rhyme scheme of abadccc. The first line of each stanza is imperative because it begins with a verb.
The first stanza has
three sentences: the first sentence is imperative while the second and third
are declarative. The second stanza has four sentences: the first sentence is also
imperative, the second, third, and fourth sentences are interrogative. It
is also very obvious that the poem uses dashes quite prominently as well as
rhetorical questions... The use of rhetorical questions is to place emphasis on
the uselessness and wastefulness of war.
LANGUAGE AND
TECHNIQUE
The language of this poem
can be said to be simple because the lexical items employed are familiar,
understandable words. However, the combination of these words in making
sentences is highly poetic because the normal grammatical pattern of sentence
construction is followed. This, together with the figurative use of words, is
to give the poem its poetic, stylistic flavor.
Though it is a narrative poem,
the poem does not use the usual narrative technique of a mere storyteller in
which the audience is a passive listener; rather, it actively challenges and
involves its audience in the unraveling of the plot. The poem achieves this by its use of
imperative constructive and its adroit employment of rhetorical questions.
These are the measures used to stir the imagination of its audience.
It is also remarkable that
the poem uses a few words and lines to articulate it great specific and
universal thematic concerns. The analysis of the figures of speech and imagery
used is given below:
Assonance: lines
4, 5, and 6
Personification: lines 2, 3, 4, 7, 13 and 14
Metaphor: lines 9 and 12
Synecdoche: lines 10 and 11
Allusion: The allusion contained in the poem is biblical.
This manifests in the use of clay(s)’ from which the Bible says the man was created.
Rhetorical question: lines 10 and 11, 12, and 13-14
In its use of imagery, the poem uses ‘the sun’ to
represent a life-giving essence of power and energy; therefore ‘its touch awoke
him (the dead soldier) once’. ‘It wakes the seeds’, etc. the prominent use of
this image can be seen in the repeated use of the word ‘sun’ in the poem; the
sun (line1), the kind old sun (line 7), the fatuous sunbeams (line 13), and ‘its
(line 2) and ‘it’ (line 8) is used in place of the sun. The poem turns to show
that any attempt made by the sun to awake a dead or lifeless matter is an
attempt in futility.
REVISION
QUESTIONS
1.
Owen, a war poet,
foretold his own death in ‘Futility’. Discuss.
2.
What is the major theme of Owen’s ‘Futility?
3.
Discuss the
figurative expressions used in Owen’s ‘Futility’.
4.
Does this poem
have a rhyme scheme?
5.
Discuss the imagery used in the poem.
By Eguriase
S. M. Okaka.
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