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Description
Flashcards by katiehumphrey, updated more than 1 year ago
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Created by katiehumphrey
over 10 years ago
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| Question | Answer |
| subject | Only five of Wilfred Owen's poems were published in his lifetime. Futility is one of them. It shows Owen's great technical skill and also the important influence of Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon had encouraged Owen to put more of his own personal experiences into his poetry. He had also turned him against the war. Instead of seeing the war as a justified attempt to free Belgium, Owen now saw the war as a struggle between Imperial powers looking to expand their lands overseas. Futility reflects this sudden change from patriotic hope to despair. |
| form and structure | Futility is written in 14 lines like a sonnet. It is not structured like one though. This poem has two seven-line stanzas. The two-stanza structure reflects the poem's change in tone, from hope and confidence to despair. The poem begins with a statement that suggests an action happening now. The sun is seen as something positive. The second stanza begins with a different statement. The narrator is no longer thinking of the man who is dying but life and death generally. We can therefore work out that the man has died and the sun has made no difference. The sun then becomes the object of the poet's anger. |
| imagery | The key image is the sun. In the first stanza this is a positive force and the imagery is all about waking up. Words such as "move him", "gently", "whispering", "rouse" all suggest a soft, motherly force. The sun is "kind" and "old". In the second stanza the image of the sun becomes negative. This is expressed in the expression "cold star". The contradiction between the star, which is hot, and the description "cold" is called an oxymoron. This shows that the sun may be literally warm but it has no feelings. It does not care that it creates life only to watch it die. The image also reminds us that people, when dead, go cold. Instead of the "kind old sun", all the poet can now see is "fatuous sunbeams" working away. "Fatuous" means 'stupid but thinking you are clever'. |
| sound | The half-rhymes bring the poem together. For example in stanza one sun-sown, once-France. There are full rhymes (snow-know and tall-all) at the ends of the stanzas. By creating a pattern of rhymes that are not exact, however, he is expressing a sense of broken harmony beneath a seemingly strong surface. |
| themes and ideas | The poem is an elegy – something written to remember someone who has died. Traditionally these are long poems that list the great deeds of the dead person. In contrast, Owen's poem is short and compact. There is no reason to celebrate a life. There is no hope anywhere. Life is 'futile'. The poem about his friend becomes an elegy for all mankind. The anger comes through personal knowledge of the dead man's peaceful past. It is made much stronger by the way Owen uses metaphors to apply this to all life. For example "fields half-sown" which refers both to the farm the dead man grew up on and the soldiers being cut down in battle like corn at harvest-time. Owen does not reach any conclusions in the poem (this too would be futile). Instead he expresses his anger in a series of rhetorical questions at the end (lines 11, 12 and 13/14). He is angry not just at war or the sun but at the whole of Creation as well. |
| comparison to 'The Falling Leaves' | The Falling Leaves – this poem is very close in theme and its use of imagery. Where Owen draws on farming to suggest lives being grown and cut down, Margaret Postgate Cole builds her poem around the central image of the tree. The contrasts between the two are mainly in form, structure and tone. Sadness rather than anger seems to be the strongest feeling. |
| comparison to 'Bayonet Charge' | Bayonet Charge – this poem is also set in the first-world war and shares some of the imagery (e.g. waking and clods of earth). The treatment of the subject matter is very different, though. Owen's is a first-person reflection. Hughes' work is a dramatic re-enactment. Bayonet Charge is active, full of fear but also full of purpose (look at all the –ing words). In Owen's poem the only action is waking that never happens. All purpose has gone. |
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