Today’s Poem: Futility

Reading Wilfred Owen on his birthday

James Wilson Morrice, On the March in France, c. 1918 (Wikimedia Commons)

---

Futility

by Wilfred Owen

Move him into the sun — 
Gently its touch awoke him once, 
At home, whispering of fields half-sown. 
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? 
═══════════════════════

Killed in action at twenty-five, a week before the Armistice that ended World War I, Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) seems to have been born — on this day, as it happens — to fulfill the bleak prophecies of his poems. Though we might say much the same of any poet killed in that war, Owen wears a particular mantle of heroic pathos as the Voice of War Experience. As our friend Phil Klay, himself a writer on war, has noted, “. . . more than almost any other poet who preceded him, his life is inextricable from his poetry.”

We might, with Klay (do read the whole essay), also hesitate over the additional mantle that has, for better or worse, settled on Owen’s shoulders: the mantle of the seminal “poet of witness.” Those poems of Owen’s that most consciously adopt that position, such as “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” or the much anthologized “Dulce et Decorum Est,” might strike us, too, as being possibly too consciously and conventionally poetic, a distillation and distancing of the brutal experience of war. We might come away feeling that some of these poems, at any rate, are less about the experience of war than about the experience of being outraged by war.

Or we might not feel that way at all. That Owen’s poetic outrage is ultimately less complex than, say, Rudyard Kipling’s treatments of the same war — see, for instance, Adam Roberts’s discussion of Kipling’s “The Changelings” — we might plausibly attribute to Owen’s youth. He died at 25, on the very edge of discovering what powers he might have had. Our perennial favorite Edward Thomas, by contrast, was 39, and though he had been writing poetry for only three years when he died, his output reflects the vision of a man who has been tried by life in more various ways over a longer period of time. In other words, maturity means something. What Owen’s mature poems might have looked like, we’ll never know.

He also died without ever gaining the sober distance from experience that might have enabled him to confront it differently in art. Again, we’re left with what he did accomplish, not with what he might have accomplished ten years on. And in a post for us this time last year, on Owen’s “Hospital Barge at Cérisy,” the poet and physician Amit Majmudar raises another way of reading Owen’s poetic dissociation from immediate experience: by understanding it as a reflexive function of post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as a more deliberate integration of his great influences, Tennyson and, especially, Keats, into his own poems.

On the battlefield, British generals had been applying, with limited success, military strategies that had worked perfectly well in the Franco-Prussian War. Owen, meanwhile, filtered his world of horrors through the sieve of Romanticism and Idylls of the King, to try to make it intelligible, if not bearable — and who can blame him? He loved the poets he loved, and he carried their poems in his mind, as in his rucksack. The whole complex human organism is wired for its own survival, and the imagination is not separate from the rest. It too seeks what sanctuary it can find.

However we understand Owen’s conscious and unconscious decisions as a poet, we are left with the poems: the output of a brief adulthood entirely consumed by the consciousness of war, in a male generation that would be devoured, as a demographic, by that war. Owen published only five poems in his lifetime, of which Today’s Poem, “Futility,” is one.

Wilfred Owen, from his posthumous 1920 Poems (Wikimedia Commons)

Written in May 1918 and published the next month in the Nation, in the same issue that also featured “Hospital Barge at Cérisy,” this battlefield poem begins in an immediate crisis. A soldier lies dead at the feet of his comrades. Over the body, one of them addresses the others. Each ababccc septet in this nameless soldier’s voice, its tetrameter lines couched between opening and closing lines in trimeter, tests both the deadness of the body before him and the coldness of the universe in which the man has died. Though it’s not precisely a sonnet, either metrically or in its rhyme scheme, that this poem consists of the sonnet’s fourteen lines makes its posing and resolution of a question, after the manner of a Petrarchan sonnet, seem apt.

The first stanza probes the futility of waking the dead, the futile hope that having awakened him before, the sun will touch him to consciousness now. The opening line enacts a trial: How dead is this dead man? Move him into the sun and see. The sun, after all, has always awakened him before, with its gentle “touch.” But by its end, this stanza raises another question: How “kindly” is this “old sun?” How gentle this universe, in which young men fall in battle beside their friends? In the second stanza, the sun’s failure to awaken the dead — when it has germinated seeds and awakened “once the clays of a cold star” — begins to seem a conscious choice. The cosmos, then, is not fundamentally good and kind, but actively cruel, its moments of seeming gentleness a lie.

The directness of this poem, especially compared with other, more consciously poetic poems by Owen, is striking. Here, the gestures toward poesy — the sun’s “whispering” in the first stanza, for example — are ironic, as we realize fully by the end, when that “whisper,” as we look back at it, seems more like the serpent’s persuasion in Eden than like genuine kindness. Anything that is consciously made beautiful is made so in order to expose the lie, the fatal trap, in that beauty.

Metrical parallels also become evident as a pattern in this stanza, reinforcing the speaker’s changing view of the nature of reality. The trimeter first line of each stanza echoes the other metrically, with the stress falling on the initial imperative (“Move/Think”), though the unstressed syllables in those lines don’t fall in exactly the same places; line 1 consists of two trochees and an iamb, while line 8 is a trochee and two iambs, a partial inversion of that initial pattern.

The last lines, meanwhile — lines 7 and 14 — are both in iambic trimeter, as though to suggest a call-and-response dynamic. But though one is a declaration and the other a question, their sense seems the reverse: the speaker is far more tentative about the “kindly old sun” than he is in his ultimate conviction that it was “fatuous” of the sun ever to awaken the earth, if all that happens on this earth is that young men die.

---

---