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Editors
Sarah Lindsay's Poetry Month Pick, April 1, 2010
"Futility"
by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
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?
Sarah Lindsay Comments:
“Futility” must be considered a war poem. Battle and its background are left out, but the dead man is away from home, he’s in France, and the writer is Wilfred Owen—a sometime pacifist who fought for England in World War I, was hospitalized with “shell shock,” returned to the front, and died in action just days before the Armistice.
Maybe I should leave out that last part. Owen’s work can stand quite well without the drama of his biography. And when I pretend to set aside for a moment “the pity of war,” “Futility” is still a marvel.
It begins by calling for a useless act in the face of death, yet the first stanza sounds like a lullaby.
Owen’s use of sound(s) is masterly: the easy vowels and gentle rhythm of the first stanza, the self-interrupting stutter and string of single syllables in the second, the perfect deployment of the almost spitting “fatuous” in the last question, where anger finally begins to rise from grief. (I’ve read that a writer should be careful not to make adjectives carry too much of the weight that ought properly to be borne by nouns and verbs, but in this case this adjective is a rock.)
I particularly prize the two-faced slant rhymes. “sun” and “France” don’t so much rhyme with each other, but “once” between them binds to both. Likewise, “sun” and “snow” both answer to “unsown.” Owen also favored pairing words that differ in the middle instead of the beginning: “star” and “stir,” “seeds” and “sides” may not be proper rhymes, but there they are, tolling (toiling) anyway.
Full disclosure: Barnacles of personal experience stick to this poem in my mind, including the sounds of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, in which “Futility” is sung as a tenor solo. I was in the college orchestra when we performed the work in its terrible entirety. One of my friends, with a fine tenor voice, was in the chorus. He was found dead that summer, lying on grass as though sleeping, not a mark on him.
The poem that begins so quietly, begins to demand answers and ends with anguish, directs its protest not against war but death—and the life that raised our hopes so we could be left in their ruins. I think of “Futility” as one of the great heartening poems of despair (“Dover Beach” being of course another). Poetry done so well in the face of despair is a splendid defiance. Though it seems to acknowledge defeat, it gives readers a chance to see words, if not clay, made to grow tall.
About Sarah Lindsay:
Sarah Lindsay is the author of Twigs and Knucklebones (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), Mount Clutter (Grove Press, 2002), and Primate Behavior (Grove Press, 1997). She is the recipient of the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize and a Lannan Literary Fellowship and earns keep as a copy editor in Greensboro, NC.
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