Futility by Wilfred Owen

Futility by Wilfred Owen
This a beautiful war poem and by no means the difficult poem students make it out to be. In fact, there are only four new and unfamiliar words and the unusual rhyme scheme that could offer a challenge in the exam.
Those new words:

1.      Clays – a human being

2.      Cold star – earth before the process of evolution (Ice Age)

3.      Fatuous – pointlessly foolish; this also indicates the poet’s change of attitude towards thr sun.

4.      Toil – to work hard

Owen uses half-rhyme, also known as slant rhyme. This is an imperfect rhyme in which the final consonant matches but vowels sounds do not match:
Sun/sown                    once/France               snow/now/know                    
seeds/sides                  star/stir                       tall/toil/all

The poem is about a soldier (the speaker) that cannot believe that his comrade (a fellow soldier) has been killed in battle. He believes that by moving him into the sun his friend can be revived. This is because he sees the sun as a miracle worker, a healing agent. The sun, he believes has special powers to give life. The speaker is in denial and shock. He reasons that the sun has been able to prove its potency before so why can’t it resuscitate his friend now. He thinks about how his friend has just died therefore making it easier for the sun to restore him back to life. The speaker thinks about the role played by the sun in the creation of the world. The sun made things grow. This has such a tremendous feat. If the sun could do this then surely it can “wake up” one lone soldier. At the end of the poem the speaker realises how useless, pointless and hopeless the sun is and how it is not powerful enough to wake his friend. A comment is also made here about the futility of war because war causes death.

Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,

Full-nerved, - still warm, - too hard to stir?

The rhetorical question is aimed not only at the Sun, the Sustainer of Life. It is also intended at the devastating concept of war in general. He was depressed and disgusted at the distressing and demoralizing consequences of the War.

Was for this that the clay grew tall? Did Man advance in Life and progressiveness to come to this? As the poet prefixes the adjective “fatuous” before sunbeams, he illustrates how the sun had lost its utility value in the face of Death. Was it for this eventual finale that the sun awoke the earthlings?