"Futility" by Wilfred Owen
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?
Wilfred Owen. What comes to mind when you read his name? If you’re like me, you might think of the grotesque descriptions of war this WWI poet is known for. Think about “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Readers are confronted with startlingly uncensored depictions of war that draw us in and keep us captivated. Many of his pieces are like watching a car crash, horrible, but how can we look away?
“Futility” is different though. In fact, I had to make sure there wasn’t a misprint when I read that Owen authored this piece. He sounds tired, burnt out, exhausted, and the poem is shorter than many of his other works, a physical representation of that exhaustion perhaps. "Dulce et Decorum Est," written a year earlier, is more lively, directly questioning a belief held by many people in Britain with dramatically horrifying imagery. Reading "Futility" almost feels like reading a note someone wrote for himself. So, I looked at a timeline of Owen’s life, wondering if there is a clear reason for this shift. There is.
“Futility” was published in The Nation on June 15, 1918 (shown below), one of only a handful of Owen’s poems published during his life.* Around that time, Wilfred Owen was drafting and redrafting many poems. He was also being treated for shellshock, what we would call PTSD. Then, with the now-familiar irony that accompanies WWI events, in the same month this poem was published, the military approved Owen's return to active service.** I think this piece reflects well what Owen might have been feeling at that moment as he was called back into a war he didn't want to happen.
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| "Futility" published in The Nation. |
“Futility” is an elegy, perhaps not in traditional form, but in the sense that it is written in remembrance of the dead. The piece opens with soldiers moving a fallen comrade into the sun, hoping (though they know it is futile) that the sun will imbue him with life once again, the way it wakes people from sleep. Maybe he’s only sleeping, the writer seems to say, even though he knows that isn't the case.
In the second stanza, Owen says that if the sun can give life to plants and put life on a planet that was once a “cold star,” surely it can do the same for a body that is still warm and already formed. When that plea fails, Owen ponders a larger question. “Was it for this the clay grew tall” alludes to the belief some people hold that man was created from clay. But what is the “this?” In my interpretation, it’s not war but death. In other words, was humanity created die? The final lines drive this message home even further: “what made fatuous sunbeams toil/To break Earth’s sleep at all?” If human life is going to end, then why bother to have it at all? This piece is a break from Owen's other poems that decry war, but it is possible to interpret the "this" as war instead. Maybe "this" is both war and death.
It wasn't until after I read this whole poem that I looked at the title, and it was like the moment in a movie or book when suddenly everything makes sense. Futility. Uselessness, pointlessness. At first, the futility is trying to revive the dead soldier, but the message is larger than that. Owen, shell-shocked, soon to be redeployed, a staunch opponent of war, expresses not the futility of war but the futility of human existence when death is an inescapable reality.
