War

This two-part sonnet was written in May 1918 and was published in The Nation the following month – one of only five poems that Owen published in

his lifetime. Taken in the context of Owen’s life (he was a soldier who saw action in 1917 and returned to France to fight in August 1918 before being killed in battle in November) and in the context of his other poems written during this period, the poem can clearly be seen as a ‘war poem’. It gradually becomes clear that the ‘him’ of the first line is a dead soldier. Like Tennyson’s poem, Owen’s is well known, and like Tennyson’s it focuses on a futile death. Like Tennyson’s, Owen’s is a poem of commemoration or mourning. In other respects, however, ‘Futility’ seems very different. It takes the form of an intimately personal, even private lyric, expressing the sadness of an individual (a soldier, rather than a civilian newspaper reader, we might surmise from the intimacy and directness of the poem). This contrasts with Tennyson’s more detached, formal and public expression of pride, a kind of triumphant mourning. For Owen, as he famously said in a planned Preface to his poems, the poetry ‘is in the pity’ (Owen 1983, 2:535). In its own way, Owen’s poem is just as much a piece of propaganda as Tennyson’s jingoistic ballad. It is a matter of anti-war propaganda in this case – though it has been read by some critics as being, in its nostalgic evocation of ‘home’, a kind of pro-British propaganda (see, for example, Pittock 2001). ‘Futility’ works as public propaganda through its very privateness. It works as propaganda by appearing not to. Only at the very end of the poem does it become evident why it is called ‘Futility’. The poem entails an almost abstract meditation on the futility of war, moving from the expression of mourning for an individual soldier to the question of the futility of human life. It shifts from curiously muted imperatives (‘move him’, ‘Think how’) to a series of plangently rhetorical questions. There is no narrative beyond this movement of the speaker’s thoughts and we know next to nothing about the individual who died, an individual who in fact seems to stand (in a kind of synecdoche) for the many others, many British at least, who died in the First World War. The poem’s sonnet form itself disavows any suggestion of militarism or of the celebration of battle: the subtly varied rhymes and half-rhymes (‘sun’, ‘once’, ‘half-sown’, ‘France’, ‘snow’, ‘now’, ‘know’) and the gently tripping rhythm (‘Think how it wakes the seeds – / Woke once the clays of a cold star’) themselves abrogate the strident uniformity of militarism. Even nationalism is subdued to a longing simply for home. The poem won’t march in step, so to speak.