Futility by Wilfred Owen
RubenCallens
expresses sorrow for the death person. My teacher had a little bit
another feeling. What feeling do you think this poem expresses? Give
me some advice
Ruben Callens
the poem :
Move him into the sun,
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fiels unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
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.
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?
(Wilfred Owen , 1893-1918)
Dead...@aol.com
To see a video animation of this poem with the writer go to http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=o5C2COCbxak
The poem has only two stanzas of seven lines each, so is not a sonnet, despite its fourteen lines. Although the lines are fairly regular there is no definite metre, but Owen uses full rhymes in his endings as in ‘sun/once’, ‘sown/snow/know’ which are combined with para-rhymes like ‘once/France’, ‘seeds/sides’ and ‘star/stir’ which have the effect of connecting themes of the personal and universal. The tone is sad with an edge of bitterness as the title itself suggests. The futility of war is combined with wider aspects of the futility of existence as the poem moves on.
The first stanza opens with a command to ‘move him into the sun’. Gradually the reader finds out why, as the poet tells us that it used to wake him when he was on his farm at home, ‘whispering of fields half-sown’ and that even out in France ‘always it woke him’ but this use of the past tense changes at line 5 with ‘Until this morning and this snow.’ The implication is that the soldier has died of hypothermia but ‘If anything might rouse him now / the kind old sun will know.’ The warmth of the sun is the only thing that could possibly help. Owen had been through this experience when his unit had to stay out in freezing weather as he details in ‘Exposure’.
The qualification of the sun as ‘kind’ is a reminder of the warmth that melts snow and prevents freezing, while ‘old’ recalls the ancient nature of the sun as part of the universe. The second stanza links these two ideas in another command, ‘Think how it wakes the seeds’ – a connection with the ‘fields half-sown’ of the first stanza, while the reminder that it ‘Woke once the clays of a cold star’ suggests both the awakening of the earth itself and of the human race who were made from its dust. If the sun has such power, the poet asks, is one body ‘too hard to stir’? The half-rhyme ‘star/stir’ helps to link the universal to the particular. The next line is a bitter question – rhetorical because it has no answer – ‘Was it for this the clay grew tall?’ What kind of futility is it for mankind to be created and to grow to manhood in order to perish on a battlefield – which is followed by a final, even more bitter question about why the earth was created at all, and why the ‘fatuous sunbeams’ toiled to bring it to life, if it was only so that men could destroy it. The word ‘fatuous’ means ‘foolish and smug’ with connotations of ‘unnecessary’, the implication being that the sunbeams, in waking the earth to life, were doing something that was all these things. The futility of universal life is thus linked to the futility of war and of an individual death.
DJ
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/item/5012?CISOBOX=1&REC=9
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/item/5013?CISOBOX=1&REC=10
As are the notes in Stallworthy's edition of the poem which points out
the debts owed to Tennyson, Scott, Davidson and Donne. Quite a stellar
cluster of English and Scottish poets.
The link to Tennyson In Memorium noted by Stallworthy is of interest.
This poem was pronanly the most debated of all English 19thc poems,
with opinions fairly evenl split over its secular/ religious
overtones.
That Owen should draw on it here might indicate his own wavering lack
of faith in either a deity or the progress of humanity........
On 4 Feb, 16:53, Deadke...@aol.com wrote:
> To see a video animation of this poem with the writer go to