Futility by KG

Futility

"Futility" was one of many war poems written by Wilfred Owen, a British Army officer during the First World War. Owen was killed on 4 November 1918, one week before the end of the war; he was still in his twenties. The poem explores the meaning of existence, the pointlessness of war and the inevitability of death. The person is facing an existential crisis. He questions the point of being born and life as whole if you’re going to die anyway. Owen uses a lot of literary techniques such as half rhymes, oxymoron, irony, onomatopoeia etc.

The structure of the poem is of a sonnet however it does not follow the structure of a sonnet. The poem has two stanzas and fourteen lines all together. The poet follows a structure of half rhythm scheme and this is visible in the words like “sun, unsown, once, France, star, stir” to create a sense of despair and frustration. For example, after 'sun', we expect words that would rhyme with sun. Instead, the poet follows it up with ‘unsown’, which does not rhyme correctly. It only has a half-rhyme, thus creating a feeling of frustration and sadness. Owen uses the structure of his poem to describe the immediate event on the battlefield and the results or the after effects of war, usually on the battle field. In this case, the poet's first stanza describes the experience of finding one of soldiers frozen to death in the morning, and the second stanza describes his anger, so the poem has a different tone in each stanza.

In the first stanza the tone of the poem is softer as the poet uses different words to bring out the tender sound of the stanza using words such as “move” and “whisper”. The tone enhances the mood of the stanza as it describes the persona’s thoughts after he finds his fellow soldier dead in the cold weather. Owen also uses assonance of the sound ‘o’ “home, unsown, woke, snow” these words create a long soft sound which brings out the persona’s feeling towards his experience. The poet then moves on to the second stanza where the persona’s tone changes from soft to a harsh tone. He uses words like “think” to start of the stanza. The word “think” changes the tone immediately as it is an imperative, it tells the reader what to do in a demanding manner. The first stanza also starts off with an imperative “move”, however it is more of a gentle tone of plea than a command. Owen also uses alliteration of the ‘c’ sound in the second to emphasis on the harshness of the cold weather and the, which automatically changes the atmosphere of the poem from soft, which is the first stanza, to harshness in the second stanza.

In ‘Exposure’ another poem written by Owen, we learn how nature is the soldiers’ enemy, but in this poem nature is seen as the healing power, they somehow rely on its care to save them in cases of death and the harsh weather. He uses the ‘sun’ to portray this as he says in the first line of the first stanza “move him into the sun” when a person is injured, the first place you take them to is a place where they can get help. In this poem the place of help was the sun. The persona looked at the sun as God, because the poet also writes about “the kind old sun will know” this line meaning that the sun was all knowing like God who knows everything. However in the second stanza, the poet contradicts this when he dismisses the idea of God and how he is all knowing, as he calls him silly in the second last line of the second stanza when the persona says “O what made fatuous sunbeams toil”. The word what in the line “O what made…” is a pun as it depends on which part of the line you stress more. Whichever way the reader reads it, it still questions God and his actions because it may mean, what made God create people and let them die again? Or what made God? So the double meaning in the word what also brings out the frustration of the persona and anger towards God.

In the first stanza we learn that there is a contrast between the words “sun” and “snow”, because the sun in the text symbolises warmth and life, whereas the snow symbolises the cold and death so the contrast in the two shows the desperation of the persona to bring back his fellow soldier. The persona then gets angry and starts questioning God’s actions as to his creations to be specific, “was it for this the clay grew tall?” meaning did God create man so that they could go to war and die?

Owen uses a lot of punctuation to create a slow pace in the poem so that it brings out the depressed and sad tone of the poem. He uses caesuras to create pauses in the middle of the sentence as though the persona is taking a moment to gather his thoughts and be able to express in the most effective way possible. The commas create a free flowing effect of the poem, this being that the reader is able to interpret the fact that the persona is sharing his thoughts and emotions.