Futility - Wilfred Owen Context Flashcards
Explain Owen’s personal experience of war
• Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) is one of the most famous English poets to emerge from the First World War. He was born on the borders of England and Wales and was interested in becoming a poet from an early age.
o War broke out in 1914 and he joined the army the following year, aged 18. Before long he had to return to England to get treatment for shell-shock (what today we would call Post-traumatic Stress Disorder – severe anxiety brought on by a stressful situation like war).
o He was sent to a hospital in Edinburgh and there he met the already well-known poet and writer Siegfried Sassoon. Owen returned to the trenches a year later and wrote some of his best-known poems. He was also decorated for his courage in battle, before being killed on 4th November 1918, just a week before peace was declared and the war finally ended.
Outline the structure of the poem
• This short but impactful poem was only one of five published during Owen’s lifetime
o It was either written at Ripon or Scarborough
o Its format is a short elegiac lyric like a sonnet, though it is not structured as one
o It features Owen’s famed pararhyme –sun, sown; star, stir; tall, toil – which disturbs the natural rhythm and gives the poem a slightly tortured mood
Explain the subject of the poem
• The poem concerns a soldier or several soldiers moving a recently deceased fellow soldier into the sun, hoping its warmth will revive him
o Despite the sun’s life-giving properties, it can do nothing for the young man; his life is cut short like the “fields half-sown”
o This was a reality known all too well to the poet – young men were being killed before their lives had barely begun
• The imagery regarding the sun contrasts its vitality and warmth with its ultimate inability to wake one who has died
o In the first stanza the sun is personified and described as “kind” and “old”, its warmth ancient and affirming
o The speaker is quiet and gently hopeful when he asks that the body be moved into the sun
o Many of Owen’s poems focus on the bond between man and Nature, and here Nature seems like it could revive the speaker’s friend
Explain the author’s meaning in the poem
• In the second stanza, however, the speaker becomes more upset and questioning, the tone shifting to accommodate the change in his mind-set
o The speaker is confused how the sun could wake the seeds and animate a fully-formed man (the Biblical “clay” of Adam), and now can do nothing
o This loss of one precious life makes the speaker bitterly wonder why “the fatuous sunbeams toil / To break earth’s sleep at all”
o Death has made a mockery of creation; the critic Gertrude M. White writes that “in violating their own human nature, in reversing by violence the natural order, men alienate themselves from Nature herself.”
• The meaning of the title, then, is the futility of trying to understand how nature could create life but stand by as it is laid to waste
o The critic Arthur E. Lane sees Owen creating a “poetic transformation of battlefield death, death particular and individual, into death as the absurd and ultimate denial of the value of life.”
