Futility

By Wilfred Owen

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields 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?

Podcast transcript

This poem was written by Wilfred Owen in May 1918, when he was serving as an officer in the British army in World War I. It describes a reaction to seeing the body of a soldier lying on the ground. And it was written only six months before Owen himself was killed. So although he was only 25 at the time, this is a ‘late’ poem by Owen.

‘Futility’ is a type of poem that has a long history: the elegy. In the ancient world, the word elegy was a formal description, meaning a poem that was written in a specific type of couplets, and elegies were written on a range of subjects, including love as well as war and death. But for the past five hundred years or so, the term ‘elegy’ in English poetry has come to mean a lament, usually for someone who has died.

And you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, you know I’m always a bit wary about bringing in too much external context to a reading of a poem; if we’re not careful, we can end up talking about the poet’s biography rather than the poem in front of us. But in this case, we absolutely need to know the context.

I mean, if you read this poem without knowing who wrote it, and when, and where, then you might be forgiven for missing the fact that, as well as being an elegy, it’s a war poem. It doesn’t mention the war at all, or describe the deceased as a soldier, or say that he died in battle.

But the fact that we know this was a young man who died at war, and that it was written by another young man who would soon be killed in the same war, is part of what makes this poem heartbreaking.

It also gains in power by being read in the context of some of Owen’s other poems, such as ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, or ‘The Dead Beat’, which are much more graphic in their description of the horrors of war, and much more savage in their criticism of those he held responsible for the carnage. ‘Futility’ isn’t exactly light relief, but it does offer a very different tone to the more graphic poems. And the stakes of ‘Futility’, so to speak, are heightened when set alongside these others.

And like most of Owen’s war poems, it’s deliberately and self-consciously written in contrast to the war poetry of previous eras, as a response to the new kind of war – of machine-guns, trenches, mud, mortar and tanks – that he and his comrades found themselves fighting.

If we go back a few decades before Owen wrote ‘Futility’, to the heart of the Victorian era, and look at a military elegy by Tennyson, we find a very different kind of poem. Here are some lines from his ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’:

Lead out the pageant: sad and slow,
As fits an universal woe,
Let the long, long procession go,
And let the sorrowing crowd about it grow,
And let the mournful martial music blow;
The last great Englishman is low.

As we can hear, this is very much a military elegy in the heroic mode. It celebrates a great general and his victories. He is portrayed as a hero, and the poetry, if you like, is in full dress uniform, marching neatly in lines, with the regular metre and full rhymes thumping and chiming away like a military band, with its ‘mournful martial music’.

But Owen gives us a very different kind of military elegy. It’s for a common soldier, an unknown soldier, since we don’t know his name. And he’s not in his dress uniform on parade, with medals on his chest and cheering crowds. He’s lying on the ground, presumably in the khaki-coloured uniform that we know was worn by British soldiers at the time. The poem says there is snow on the ground and mentions ‘clay’ twice, so I can’t help picturing him covered in mud.

And there are no crowds to cheer him, no family or friends or lover to welcome him. But someone is watching him, and feeling pity for him. And that person is a poet.

Owen didn’t live to assemble a collection of his poems, but he was thinking in terms of a collection, and his notes for the preface of the book contain a famous statement about his intentions as a war poet:

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.

Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.

My subject is War, and the pity of War.

The Poetry is in the pity.

Probably more than any of Owen’s other poems, ‘Futility’ is a poem of pity.

And the poetry that he uses to express this pity is an interesting stopping point, you might even say a no man’s land, between the poetry of the Victorian era and the free verse that became the mainstream poetry of the 20th century.

Because, even when he was appalled by the violence and the wastefulness of the war, and the jingoistic, imperialistic tone of the propaganda that kept it going, Owen didn’t entirely lose faith with the past and its traditions, at least in poetry. I’ve contrasted ‘Futility’ with Tennyson’s elegy, but we know that he liked and admired Tennyson as a poet, as well as Browning, Shelley, Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and other great poets in the English tradition.

One reason we know this is that we still have Owen’s books. When I was at college, they were displayed in a glass case in the library of the English department, so I used to walk past them every time I used the library.

And miraculously, they were still kept in the same order that he left them on his bookshelf. So it was an uncanny feeling, to be able to stare at these book spines and to know that this is exactly what Owen saw when he looked at his books. These would have been his treasures, the companions of his heart. It was like looking into his eyes.

I’ll link to a photo of his books from the show notes. And there you’ll see his copies of Tennyson and Shakespeare and the other poets I mentioned. And if you read some of his earlier poetry you can see the influence of poets like Keats and Tennyson, and sense a longing to write in that kind of Romantic vein.

And scholars have detected in Owen’s title, ‘Futility’, an echo of another famous elegy by Tennyson, In Memoriam, which he wrote for his friend Arthur Hallam, and which contains the line ‘O life as futile, then, as frail!’.

They have also linked the line ‘The kind old sun will know’, to John Donne’s poem ‘The Sun Rising’, which if you remember from Episode 40, begins, ‘Busy old fool, unruly sun!’.

And personally I can’t help wondering whether Owen was also thinking of Shakespeare’s play Henry V, which was about an English army going to fight in France, when he wrote these lines:

At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,

Because when Hostess Nell describes Falstaff’s death, safe in bed in England, she says Falstaff ‘babbled of green fields’.

So we can hear echoes of the poetic past in ‘Futility’, but it is also in tune with the new kind of poetry being written at the start of the 20th century. And we can hear this in the very first line of the poem:

Move him into the sun—

It just sounds like someone talking, doesn’t it? It doesn’t sound metrical at all. It’s completely different to the thumping rhythms of Tennyson’s elegy for the Duke of Wellington.

If we were told we had to scan the line, we’d probably say it was two trochees, with the stress on the first syllable of ‘Move him’ and ‘into’, followed by an iamb, with the stress on the second syllable of ‘the sun’.

In the next three lines, there are several more trochees, with the initial stress of ‘Gently’, ‘Always’ and ‘even’, and there’s a delightfully suggestive run of unstressed syllables starting with ‘whispering’, but overall, we start to pick up a more iambic pattern:

Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,

And by the end of the stanza, the verse has fallen into a very regular iambic tetrameter, ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM, ending with a trimeter, which only has three beats:

Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Amazingly, Owen’s poem turns out to have the same iambic metre as Tennyson’s elegy for Wellington, and several lines in both poems are in iambic tetrameter.

So this is a great example of the difference between metre – the underlying pattern of regular stresses – and rhythm, which is about how we experience the flow of sound in a particular poem. And it shows how skilful poets can achieve very different rhythmic effects using the same basic metre.

And if you’re thinking you’ve come across an effect like this before, of a poem starting with a natural conversational rhythm, and modulating into a more regular and musical rhythm, based on a traditional metre, then you may be thinking of Episode 20, when we looked at Edward Thomas’s poem ‘Adlestrop’. And it’s probably no coincidence that Thomas was also a First World War poet, because they were both writing in the same poetic and historical moment.

This was the time when self-proclaimed revolutionaries like Ezra Pound were trying to ‘break the pentameter’ and establish a radical new type of free verse poetry, based on the rhythms or cadences of speech.

Now, Owen and Thomas were definitely not revolutionaries, but they were both caught up in the winds of change, and both of them responded with a kind of bittersweet poetry that mixes nostalgia for the past with the rhythms of speech and acute perception of the present.

So when we looked at ‘Adlestrop’, we saw Thomas using that stops and starts of syntax and punctuation to inhibit and then release the flow of his verse. Owen doesn’t really do that, he relies more on varying the metre by shifting the stresses in those trochaic feet. And he also takes a more innovative approach to rhyme than Thomas.

Owen is well known for his use of pararhyme, rhyming words with different vowels but the same consonants. And he uses pararhyme very skilfully in ‘Futility’. For example, he rhymes ‘sun’ and ‘unsown’, keeping the consonants ‘s’ and ‘n’ either side of the vowel, which shifts from ‘u’ to ‘o’. And ‘snow’, ‘now’ and ‘know’ all have an ‘n’ sound before the ‘o’, and a ‘w’ sound after it, so they all look very similar to the eye, but when read aloud, of course, the pronunciation of ‘o’ shifts from ‘o’ to ‘o’ and back to ‘o’.

So ‘Futility’ has a regular rhyme scheme as well as a regular metre, but both of them are softened, or ‘disguised’, is the way we often put these days. The rhymes are not as ‘emphatic’ as full rhymes, to borrow a word from T. S. Eliot, which we came across last month when we looked at Shelley in Episode 54.

And it’s tempting to draw an analogy between Owen’s use of form and the military-historical moment he was living in. The poetic form of Tennyson’s elegy for Wellington, with its thumping rhythms and full rhymes, is like a regiment of British in the red coats of their dress uniform, marching on parade or into battle at Waterloo. Wheres the form of Owen’s ‘Futility’ is like looking a regiment in 1918, after years in the trenches – the underlying structures, poetic and military, are still there, but they have been muddied and blunted and roughened up by the realities of war.

And this formal tension mirrors what I think is an ambiguous tone of voice in ‘Futility’. So on the one hand, the tone is very gentle, even tender. We really feel the pity of war in the first stanza:

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields 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.

There’s a tenderness in that opening line, ‘Move him into the sun’, and in the use of words like ‘gently’, ‘whispering’, and ‘kind’. But surely there’s also an element of irony here too? I mean, do we really believe that the speaker of the poem seriously thinks that moving the dead soldier into the sun will wake him up?

I have read critiques of the poem that say the soldier may be unconscious, rather than dead, but the poem doesn’t say so. It says the the soldier’s sides are ‘full-nerved – still warm –’ and to me that ‘still’ suggests that the speaker knows he’s looking at a dead body.

So why does he say ‘move him into the sun?’. Is he in shock, and trying to deny the evidence of his eyes? Is he hoping against hope that he’s wrong, and that the soldier will wake up? Or is it just a sentimental gesture?

Or… is there a hint of bitter irony in his use of ‘if’, when he says ‘If anything might rouse him now / the kind old sun will know’?

I think there’s a beautifully judged ambiguity about the tone of this first stanza, that gives it a subtle but unmistakeable dramatic tension. This is what stops it from tipping over into sentimentality.

And this is partly because of the poem’s title: ‘Futility’. This is the first word we read, and of course, it lets us know that whatever comes next will be futile. That any hope will be vain, that any light will be extinguished, that the ending will not be happy.

Part of the dramatic tension comes from the gap between what the speaker of the poem knows, and what the poet knows.

You know, this an ongoing and thorny debate – if you study poetry, you’re constantly being warned not to identify the ‘I’ of the poem too closely with the ‘I’ of the poet. And with different poets and different poems, we can sense these two ‘I’s being closer or further away.

In Owen’s war poems it feels like he’s deliberately bringing the two ‘I’s as close as he can. Part of the point, and the power of his poetry, was to act as a witness, to speak of unspeakable events as accurately and truthfully as he could.

So on one level, ‘Futility’ feels like an attempt to recording his thoughts and feelings as vividly as he can, to get as close as possible to that experience. But doing it in poetry, as in any art, requires a certain coldness, a certain distance, otherwise he would be overwhelmed by the emotion. So the poetry is in the pity, but writing poetry also requires a certain absence of pity.

And the fact that the poet knows that the speaker’s hope is futile adds that layer of dramatic irony to the first verse.

And then in the second verse, we get a shift of perspective, away from the soldier lying on the ground, and towards a kind of cosmic, almost Biblical language and imagery:

Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.

So the ‘it’ here is the sun. And Owen first reminds us how the sun wakes the seeds every year, in the natural cycle of the seasons. And then he takes us back in time, in that resonant line, where he says the sun, ‘Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.’. So this is going back to the creation of life on earth, ‘a cold star’, where the sun’s warmth was essential to waking life from it’s ‘clays’.

Then we get three rhetorical questions, starting with this one:

Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved,—still warm,—too hard to stir?

In other words, is it really so hard for the sun to ‘stir’ these limbs and wake the soldier? And of course we know the answer to that.

The final two rhetorical questions are more abstract:

Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?

Here we’ve gone beyond the individual tragedy of the dead soldier, to the futile waste of life in what Owen believed was not only a brutal but also a stupid and senseless war.

But he doesn’t stop there. That ‘at all’ at the end of the final line makes it clear that he’s questioning the whole point of life in the face of death. Why bother living at all if we all end up dead? It’s a question many sages and philosophers have posed down the ages. And they’ve come up with all kinds of answers. But not many of them have put the question so eloquently, or so pointedly.

And let’s pause and savour that really surprising adjective, ‘fatuous’, that Owen uses to describe the sunbeams. It’s not a particularly poetic word is it? It’s usually applied to silly or trivial people. So it’s really surprising to have it applied to ‘sunbeams’, and the sun, which are usually described with reverence by poets. Even a poet as cynical as Philip Larkin wrote a poem called ‘Solar’ which sounds like a devotional hymn. But ‘fatuous’ is perfect for the anger, the exasperation, that the speaker feels when faced with so much unnecessary loss.

And before we hear the poem again, I can’t help remarking on another layer of context that is all too real for us right now. The fact that, right now, on mainland Europe, only a few thousand miles east from where Owen fought in the trenches, Ukrainian and Russian soldiers are engaged in brutal trench warfare.

Poetry won’t do them any good. Any more than it did the soldiers in World War I. As Owen said in his preface to his poems:

these elegies are in no sense consolatory to this generation. They may be to the next . . . All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poet must be truthful.

So it’s depressingly easy to relate to Owen’s sense of futility in the face of war. But if there is any kind of redemption for the human race, or any chance of lessening the risk of carnage on this scale, then surely it also involves Owen’s sense of pity.

The word ‘pity’ doesn’t appear in this poem. But it must have been in Owen’s mind as he wrote. Maybe that’s why it rhymes with the poem’s title, ‘Futility’.

 

---

Futility

By Wilfred Owen

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields 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

Wilfred Owen was an English poet and soldier who was born in 1893 and died in 1918. He was part of a generation of distinguished war poets that fought in the First World War. He volunteered to fight, in spite of his pacifist beliefs; we wrote that this was firstly to help his fellow soldiers by leading them as an officer, and also to bear witness to their suffering and sacrifice in his poetry. He was awarded the Military Cross, one of the highest honours in the British army, for his leadership and courage on the battlefield. Only a handful of his poems were published in his lifetime, but the rest were published posthumously, and form a major and influential body of war poetry. He was killed in action in November 1918, exactly a week before the end of the war.  

 

---

A Mouthful of Air – the podcast

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app.

You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email.

The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman.

A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant.