Futility by Wilfred Owen

Futility 

By: Wilfred Owen

Move him into the sun—

Gently its touch awoke him once,

At home, whispering of fields unsown.

Always it awoke 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?

As Wilfred Owen was a poet in the WW1 era, he often wrote about the frontline and the ugly reality of war however, this poem talks about the existence and pointlessness(futility) of the war as well as the inevitability of death which is ironic, considering he died at the age of 25years. 

The main idea or purpose of the poem was to illustrate the daily lives and fear of death that the soldiers faced as they were constantly surrounded  by death. The first bit of the poem is about a soldier or soldiers moving one of their  fellow men into the sun in hope that it will bring him back to life, however despite it's life giving properties, in this case, there is nothing the sun can do. This shows us the reality that the soldiers faced - even though they were so young with their entire lives ahead of them, they were killed nonetheless, and there was not much that could be done about it. 

The tone of the poem then shifts from being quiet and hopeful to very much confused and angry. The writer begins questioning nature and existence; in that the sun adds life to plants and seeds but why not to the life of a human being?. This implies the futility of both the sun and life itself. The use of half-rhyme in the poem, helps create frustration and sadness, with this, we as the readers try to empathise with the soldier.