1. Form:
resulting
overall style,
type of
poetry
Structure: how
the text has been
put together,
what bits in what
order
Language: choice of
words; images; sounds,
sentence structures;
rhythms; punctuation.
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How do you
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2. Futility

3. 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? Futility, by Wilfred
Owen

4. Narrative
• What’s the story of the text?
• The poem is bleakly realistic. The voice of the poem
commands a (recently deceased, it becomes clear) fellow
soldier to be moved into the sun, hoping its warmth will revive
him. But despite the sun's life-giving properties, it can do
nothing for him: his life is cut short like the "fields half-sown”
he came from. The ‘Futility’ of the title perhaps is the
difficulty of understanding how the sun could create life only
to waste it in death so young.

5. Form and Structure
• Its format is a short elegiac lyric (elegy = poem for the
dead) with fourteen lines like a sonnet, though otherwise
it is not structured as one.
• In the first stanza the speaker gently, lovingly asks
(commands, as a junior officer?) that a body be moved
into sunlight, and talks of where the dead lad came from.
• In the second stanza, however, the speaker becomes
more upset and questioning in tone. Why does the sun
‘wake the seeds’ and the "the fatuous sunbeams toil / To
break earth's sleep at all”? There are many questions
and a hectoring tone.
• Death ultimately mocks creation. Hope becomes
despair.

6. Language
N.B. Owen’s technical skill is remarkable. Sassoon coached him, mind.
• Owen’s characteristic pararhyme (a.k.a. ‘half-rhyme’ – sun, sown;
star, stir; tall, toil) perhaps gives the poem a slightly tortured or
uncertain mood. Each stanza ends with full rhyme though.
• The ‘sun’ is first personified as kindly (‘kind old’), but later his
sunbeams are ‘fatuous’ (foolish, stupid, inane, perhaps from ignis
fatuus/Will o’the Wisp/’foolish fire’.) Initial warmth/ vitality contrast
with powerlessness.
• ‘Clay’ is perhaps a biblical word (Owen wondered about training as
a clergyman) and refers to creation myths.
• The language becomes more abstract in the second stanza: ‘seeds’,
‘clays’, ‘limbs’, ‘cold star’ (an oxymoron).
• The language is very assonantal, giving the poem a sad, plaintive
tone.
• Angry rhetorical questions begin to abound too though.

7. Owen’s view of his writing
• "I am not concerned with Poetry. My
subject is War, and the pity of War. The
Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are
to this generation in no sense conciliatory.
They may be to the next. All a poet can do
today is warn. That is why the true Poets
must be truthful.”
• Owen’s initial patriotism turns into anger at
the horror of the conflict.

8. Wilfred Owen as a poet
• Wilfred Owen – along with his friend and mentor, Siegfried Sassoon – is now thought
of as the poet who exposed the brutalities of trench warfare and the senseless waste
of life caused by World War One.
• Dylan Thomas called him a ‘poet of all times, all places and all wars’ because his
poems exposed ‘the foolishness, unnaturalness, horror, inhumanity and
insupportability of war’.
• Sassoon called Owen a ‘man of absolute integrity of mind’ and wrote that ‘In the
last year of his life he attained a clear vision of what he needed to say, and these
poems survive as his true and splendid testament’.
• Apart from technical skill, his poems are characterised by bleak, unflinching realism,
imbued with compassion for the soldiers.
• ‘Futility’ is one of only five poems to have been published in Owen’s lifetime. It was
probably written in Ripon, England in May 1918 and it appeared in June 1918 in the
magazine The Nation. Owen gave categories to some of his poems: ‘Futility’ comes
under the heading ‘Grief’.
• Benjamin Britten included nine poems by Owen including ‘Futlity’ in the text of his
‘War Requiem’, first performed in 1962.

9. Biography: Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)
• In 1913 Wilfred Owen became a private tutor in France, a position he held until he
enlisted in 1915.
• Owen was drafted to France in 1917, in what was the worst winter of the war. After
spending January to April in the trenches, he was sent to Edinburgh’s Craiglockhart
War Hospital for the shell-shocked where he met Siegfried Sassoon, a poet he
admired, who encouraged and influenced him.
• Owen spent only four months fighting and only five weeks in the front line, but the
shock of the horrors of war was so great that he decided it was his task to expose the
‘Pity of War’and represent the experiences of the men in his care.
• Both poets were persuaded to return to the Front. In a letter to his mother Owen
wrote: ‘I came out again in order to help these boys; directly, by leading them as well
as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their suffering that I may speak of them as
well as a pleader can.’
• Owen was killed on 4 November 1918 trying to get his men across the Sambre
Canal. The news reached his parents seven days later, on Armistice Day.
• Despite his views on the senseless waste of war, Wilfred Owen was awarded the
Military Cross in recognition of his courage and leadership during the breaking of the
Hindenburg Line in October 1918.

10. Writing task
• What technical devices does Owen use to
convey his feelings about conflict in
‘Futility’?
– What are his feelings about conflict?
– How does he use formal, structural, and
linguistic choices to convey his feelings?