Futility

Owen is considered to be one of the greatest poets of World War I His “Futility” is a brief poem of fourteen lines divided into two stanzas.   It is a poem about an   English soldier who died in a snowy evening while fighting in France. The poem marks   a fancy into pathos and irony that the sun might still revive him. The poet requests some who are present at the spot to move the dead soldier into the sun as the sun is the cause of blossoming of all lives or living organism. But the poet’s wish is not fulfilled. The poet tells us to think how the kind, old sun wakes the seeds – how it once woke the earth on which life developed by the heat of the sun. the poet seems to feel the limbs of the dead soldier still warm which grew out of clay; but all in vain. The poet only questions the purpose of generating life of it was to end in this way in the battle field.
            “Move him into the sun –
            Gently its touch awoke him once”,

            War begets war only. It can never bring peace by any means. It can only bring the large scale of death and destruction to human life and properly. It is basically – “the organized butchery of young boys”. The arm-chair politicians, the War-mongers, the opportunists are the dealers of war; the outcome in the name of profit is nothing but the toll of huge human lives. Soldiers are sent to the war-front only to be doomed. They went the battlefield with the faces ‘grimly-gay’. The ideals of the military strength and supremacy of state are as undependable as forts that are not Walled – “none will break ranks though nations trek from progress”. In a letter to his mother Owen Wrote – “I feel my own life all the more precious and more dear in the presence of deflowering of Europe. While it is true that the guns will effect a little useful weeding, I am furious with chagrin to think that Minds which were to have excelled the civilization of ten-thousand years are being annihilated and bodies, the product of eons of Natural...