Transcript here

FUTILITY
BY WILFRED OWEN
SUMMARY OF POEM:
• This poem was written at Ripon in May 1918.
• It tries to capture the essence of feelings of futility;
of senselessness and waste.
• Owen wants the reader to understand the utter
pointlessness of life beginning if it is to end on the
battlefield.
• He is not concerned with the politics of war or with
taking sides. He is concerned with the “pity of war”;
the tragedy that war is.
SUMMARY CONT.
• The poem begins with hope, but ends with despair.
• At the beginning of the poem, the sun is a source of all life,
vitality and strength.
• The poem ends, however, with the sun being viewed as
meaningless and ineffectual – “fatuous”.
• The poem gradually builds up tension between opposites and
finally explodes in a feeling of complete frustration at the
pointlessness of life.
• The responder begins to experience the tragic nature of war in
the frustration of never realising one’s potential – “fields
unsown”, the grief of those left behind – “always woke him”,
the bitterness when death is seen as the end – “was it for this
the clay grew tall” and the strong contradiction between the
power and vitality of nature – “woke, once, the clays of a cold
star” and the finality of death.
STANZA ONE: MEANING
• One soldier tells another to move the man’s body into the
warmth of the sun.
• He gives as his first reason for this instruction, the fact that the
dead soldier used to be a young farmer back in his “home”
country – a youth who would wake at sunrise each day in the
past, because the warmth would remind him that he had to
get out into his fields and sow his crops.
• Owen’s subject is a rural lad who had once had wheat fields
to sow. He is in tune with nature and woke with the sun, even
in the unnatural environment of war. But now the sun’s warmth
is powerless to rouse him and Owen contrasts that
rejuvenating element with the wintry world of death.
• The persona of the poem thinks hopefully, that the sun is like a
kind old God or powerful old man, who will know what to do
to make his friend wake up.
STANZA ONE - TECHNIQUES:
Move him into the sun –
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields
unsown.
• Instructional language heightened by
the use of present tense imperatives
• Nameless young man who dies in this
poem is representative of all those who
die needlessly in war.
• Symbol of life; creation – depicted in
positive terms as a gentle
• Tone: assertive and reasoning
• Personification of the sun / adverb
“gently”= warmth /gentle giver of life
and heat – a possible saviour and
worker of miracles for this man
• Nostalgic reference to “home” with
connotations of peace, safety and
release
• This suggests the potential of things yet
to be achieved
• The assonance of the “o” creates a long
drawn out sound, reflecting the long
distance the man is away from his
home.
STANZA ONE CONT.
Always it woke him, even in France
Until this morning and this snow
The kind old sun will know
• Placement of “Always” emphasises
the contrast with “Until” – further
highlighted by repetition of “this”
• The word “Always” shows their
desperation and refusal to accept
that he is dead.
• Bitter acknowledgement of his
death
• Disbelief that even here in this
hostile place, the sun still had the
power to arouse up until now.
• Personification of sun as gentle and
father figure
• Pun on “Son” of God – loving,
powerful
STANZA TWO: MEANING
• Any hope that was aroused in the first stanza is soon dismissed as the second stanza
opens with continued focus on the sun and its power:
• It makes seeds start growing as they feel the earth around them warming up
• It was powerful enough to help to start life on earth and get evolution going
• The narrator then begins to wonder about how much power to revive the young man the
sun actually has.
• He asks if legs and arms which take so long and strong are too hard for the sun to move.
Next he asks if the young man’s sides, which are full of nerve-endings and which still feel
warm (as the soldier has only recently died) are also too hard for the sun to affect.
• His third question is to ask why men were made by God at all, if they were just going to
die uselessly like this.
• His final question shows he has totally lost his faith in the power of the physical sun; in the
power of the “Son” of God, the Christian creator of the world. He accuses the sunbeams
of being “fatuous” – self-satisfied for no good reason and bitterly demands to know why
earth wasn’t left as a dead “star” by creation – because if a strong young man can die
like this – not even in an actual fight – everything about life seems totally pointless.
STANZA TWO: TECHNIQUES
Think how it wakes the seeds, -
• Extended metaphor of sun as father and
developer / harbinger of life itself
• Allusion t scientific origins of life on earth
Woke, once, the clays of a cold
star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are
sides,
Full-nerved, - still warm, - too hard
to stir?
• Refusal to believe the truth that limbs still
warm cannot be roused
• Rhetorical questions becoming more,
and more demanding and ironic or
bitter in tone as they increase in number.
• Punctuation of dashes and commas
separating out each phrase suggests
looking at and/or touching different
parts of the dead soldier’s body, with
increasing desperation.
STANZA TWO CONT.
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
-O what made fatuous sunbeams
toil?
To break earth’s sleep at all?
• Rhetorical questions pose the
eternal agony of “why”?
• Disgust and bitterness are
evident in the spat out phrase
“for this”.
• Use of “O” is onomatopoeic of
crying out in pain – reinforces
the idea that he is rebelling
against his personal loss and at
the futility of life during war.
• Owen questions the purpose of
life itself and asks readers to
ponder if it is all for nothing