1Move him into the sun—
2Gently its touch awoke him once,
3At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
4Always it woke him, even in France,
5Until this morning and this snow.
6If anything might rouse him now
7The kind old sun will know.
8Think how it wakes the seeds—
9Woke once the clays of a cold star.
10Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
11Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
12Was it for this the clay grew tall?
13—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
14To break earth's sleep at all?
"Futility" is a poem by Wilfred Owen, a British soldier during World War I. Written in 1918, the poem elegizes an unnamed soldier lying dead in the snow in France. This image resonates with the poem's speaker, causing him or her to reassess life's value, given death's inevitability. Unlike Owen's other poems, which contain violent bodily imagery, this poem features a calmer, more resigned tone, underlining the speaker's act of mourning the "futility" of life in the face of death.
Move the dead soldier into the sun. Its warm touch used to wake him in the morning, reminding him of fields he had to finish filling with seeds. It always woke him up, even on the battlefields of France, until this snowy morning. If anything can wake him now, the kind old sun will know about it.
Think of how the sun lets seeds grow as if waking them up, and how it allowed human life to spring from the Earth, which was once a barren, cold planet. Are dead bodies—still precious, full of nerves, and warm—too hard to move anymore? Did life emerge from Earth just so it could die? Why would useless sunlight have bothered to wake the Earth at all?
Owen’s “Futility” elegizes an unnamed soldier lying dead in the snow in France. The speaker begins with a hopeful tone, wanting the sun to “rouse” the dead body, but shifts to one of confusion and disillusionment upon recognizing that death will always conquer life. Through this shift in tone, the poem uses the dead soldier as a catalyst for a larger, deeper mourning: that of the “futility” of the act of creation in the face of death’s inevitability.
The poem’s confident descriptions of the sun’s power to nourish life in the first stanza contrast with the way it doubts life’s purpose in the second stanza. The speaker’s first response to seeing the dead soldier is to “Move him into the sun,” because the sun “always” woke him throughout his life. Even though the soldier is dead, the speaker seems confident that “the kind old sun will know” a way to revive him. Yet while the sun may be powerful enough to “wake” seeds and “warm” even the surface of a distant star, it cannot resurrect the fallen soldier.
The speaker is perplexed at how something as precious and beautiful as life can always lose out to death, and puts forth a rhetorical question as a way of underlining his or her shock: “Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides / Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?” The dead body, albeit surrounded by warm sunlight, will never come back to life. The speaker then asks “Was it for this the clay grew tall?” ("clay" being a reference to the earth that human beings originally came from—an idea common in creation myths throughout the world, including the Bible), expressing incredulity that life would bother existing given that it would always lose to death.
The speaker woefully wonders in the poem’s final two lines why the “fatuous,” or pointless, “sunbeams” would help create life on earth in the first place, when that life would eventually die. The speaker’s perspective thus widens beyond the dead soldier to include all of life. Rather than only being an elegy to a specific person (whom the poem does not even bother to name), the poem is also dedicated to mourning death’s power over life—an idea magnified by the context of war.
Although it contains tinges of hope, the poem’s tone ultimately comes across as mournful, doubtful, and discouraging. When situated in historical context, these tonal qualities make sense. Wilfred Owen was a British soldier during World War I, and was therefore surrounded by death. Regardless of however many sunny days occurred during the war, death likely dominated his mind, a perspective that manifests in “Futility.”
Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
The "him" refers to a dead soldier whom the speaker and the speaker's comrades gather around in the snow. They want to keep the body warm and sunlit to preserve its dignity. Keeping the dead body warm might seem pointless, but it reminds the soldiers of the sun's positive effect on him throughout his life, which the speaker briefly recalls.
From the lines "Gently its touch awoke him once, / at home, whispering of fields half-sown," readers can gather that the fallen soldier may have been a farmer who awoke each morning by the sun's light, which reminded him to finish planting seeds in nearby fields. This recollection of the soldier's past humanizes him, informing readers of a time when he didn't have to be a soldier and risk his life each day.
Notice, too, that the sun has a "touch" as well as "whispers." These two features personify the sun, as well as convey gentle imagery, making it seem almost human in the way it interacted with the soldier when he was alive. Even though the speaker, having seen many other soldiers fall in combat, knows that the soldier will never wake up, the act of moving him into the sun seems the closest thing to an attempt at revival, even if it is ultimately futile. If the sun woke the soldier each day throughout his life, "gently" touching him and "whispering," why might it not do the same now?
The poem also rearranges stress to capture these features. The poem begins with an instruction, and its first line fittingly uses two trochees:
Move him | into | the sun—
These stressed syllables force the reader to pay close attention, as if the reader were the one being instructed to move the dead soldier. At the same time, this line's third foot indicates that the poem will probably follow an iambic meter. And it does: each stanza begins and ends with an iambic trimeter, while the intervening lines are all in iambic tetrameter.
Line 2 then also begins with a trochee ("Gently"), as if the sun is softly pressing down on the meter. Similarly, line 3's second foot is a trochee or dactyl, depending on how it's read:
At home, | whispering | of fields | half-sown.
"[W]hispering" can be read as having two syllables or three. Either way, its initial stress captures the excitement in the image of the sun whispering to a person.
These first three lines also reveal a larger occurrence throughout the poem, which is that of pararhyme. The words "sun" and "half-sown" share an ending consonant, while their stressed vowel sounds are different. This trend occurs throughout the remainder of the poem (and was commonly used by Owen). It conveys a kind of out-of-tune, partially haphazard sound that mimics the dissonance of the battlefield. If every line contained perfect rhyme, the poem would perhaps be too harmonious for its content.
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.
Unlock all 412 words of this analysis of Lines 4-7 of “Futility,” and get the Line-by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.
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Get LitCharts A+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?
The sun represents life in the poem: it has the power to create and sustain living things through its warm light. The poem metaphorically associates this power with the act of waking up. After all, light literally has the ability to wake up sleeping humans.
As a symbol, the sun is intertwined with the Earth. First, the poem associates the sun with farming and plant growth. The sun's early morning light reminds farmers to get back to their "half-sown," or half-planted, fields. Metaphorically, its light "wakes the seeds," which use photosynthesis to grow. Taking this thinking one step further, the speaker alludes to various creation myths in which living things were first created out of "clay," or dirt, that had been exposed to sunlight. In this line of thought, the sun is directly responsible for life on Earth, transforming the planet from a "cold star" to a fertile world.
In Western culture, the sun is also often associated with God or a god, such as Apollo. Yet "Futility" depicts the limits of its divine power. For instance, the poem personifies the sun to emphasize both ways the sun cared for the dead soldier as well as the shortcomings of that care. Earlier in the soldier's life, the "kind old sun" shone on the soldier to "[g]ently" wake him. Now, that gentleness isn't enough—the sun can't bring the soldier back from death. The sun's "toil" to bring the earth to life has been "fatuous," or useless, because all living things die.
The speaker's aporia manifests in the series of rhetorical questions he or she asks in the second stanza, each wondering about life's purpose. The intensity with which the speaker asks these questions shows how much he or she cared about this fallen soldier.
Immediately after a description of the sun's power to wake both "seeds" and "clay," the speaker asks "Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides / Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?" In other words, can life really stop so suddenly after all the work that went into it? The speaker already knows the answer to this question (the answer is yes), but asks it anyway to highlight the extent of the speaker's disbelief.
The speaker's next question, "Was it for this the clay grew tall?" is a similarly rhetorical question suggesting that life's work went to waste, and that the clay "grew tall" for no apparent reason. Here, "clay" refers to mythological stories in which humans were created from lifeless lumps of clay. The speaker is wondering what the point of creating people was, if they were only going to die.
The last rhetorical question is perhaps the most powerful, for it calls into question why life would even bother existing. The speaker wonders if earth may have been better off "asleep," for it seems unnecessary and cruel that sunbeams would have "toiled" for so long just to let their creations die. Rather than providing a gentle "touch" as they did in the first stanza, the sunbeams here are "fatuous," for they only seem to lead to death. Throughout each of these questions, the reader gains a sense for how much the speaker cared for the soldier that died. If the speaker hadn't shared a strong bond with him, the speaker likely wouldn't have been as motivated to question life's purpose so intensely.
Unlock all 254 words of this analysis of Assonance in “Futility,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
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Get LitCharts A+Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
The act of sowing is that of planting seeds in a field. A field that is half-sown is therefore only half-filled with seeds.
The poem's form resembles that of a sonnet, given that it is fourteen lines, although its rhyme scheme and structure are slightly different.
One structure of the sonnet that the poem does clearly borrow, however, is that of the volta, which is the "turn" a sonnet takes as it transitions from one subject or tone to another around its halfway point. In "Futility," there is a clear volta between the first and second stanzas (in a traditional sonnet, this volta would instead occur at line 9). In the first stanza, the speaker exudes a calm and positive tone while describing the "gentle" touches of sunlight on the dead soldier, as well as nurturing the hope that the "kind old sun" will know a way to stave off death. In the second stanza, the poem's tone shifts to one of discouragement and perplexity at the possibility that life is actually "futile."
It should be noted that, historically, sonnets are associated with love. "Futility" also deals with love, albeit in a new manner. The poem depicts love for the speaker's fallen comrade, as well as love for life itself, despite its futility. In this way, the poem both reference poetics traditions and reinvents them for its own purposes.
"Futility" has a subtle meter. Each stanza's first and last lines follow a loose iambic trimeter, while all other lines between them follow an iambic tetrameter.
Take line 7, for example, which shows iambic trimeter:
The kind | old sun | will know.
And now look at line 12, which shows iambic tetrameter:
Was it | for this | the clay | grew tall?
These are very traditional meters for English poetry. In using them, the poem might be pushing the reader to see it as engaging with poetry of the past.
However, the poem doesn't always follow these meters exactly. For instance, each stanza begins with a trochee instead of an iamb. In fact, the first stanza starts off with two trochees:
Move him | into | the sun—
And the second starts off with one:
Think how | it wakes | the seeds—
By beginning on stressed syllables, these lines emphasize their status as commands. They force the reader to pay attention to their orders: to "move" the dead soldier and to "think."
Sometimes Owen also disrupts the metrical flow of each line via caesuras. For instance, in line 11 the stresses bunch up as commas interrupt the line, so that the first two feet can be read as spondees:
Full-nerved, | still warm, | too hard | to stir
This bunching up mimics the image it describes: an immobile body packed with nerves, blood, and heat. In general, the poem uses these disruptions of meter to push against the tradition it's borrowing from. It wants the reader to see how it distances itself from past depictions of war.
A more uniform pattern, however, exists in the syllable count of each stanza. Each line in the first stanza also contains the same number of syllables as its counterpart in the second stanza, with the exception of one line pair (lines 4 and 11, which are only one syllable off).
This metrical mirroring suggests an intriguing relationship between the two stanzas—that they act as thematic mirrors of one other. Each stanza concerns itself with the sun's power to create life, but the first has an optimistic view while the second has a pessimistic view.
"Futility" contains many pararhymes and more general slant rhymes. This makes its rhyme scheme slightly difficult to perceive. However, despite this subtlety, the poem's rhyme scheme can be stated as follows:
ABABCCC DEDEFFF
Almost all the poem's end rhymes are slant rhymes. In contrast to perfect rhymes, these slant rhymes suggest a feeling of imperfection and uncertainty. They create a kind of out-of-tune, dissonant music, which mimics the distressing emotions of the battlefield.
There are only two moments of perfect rhyme in the poem, which occur in lines 5 and 7 ("snow" and "know"), and lines 12 and 14 ("tall" and "all"). Both these perfect rhymes occur in the same spots in each stanza: namely, on the first and third C rhymes in the first stanza, and the first and third F rhymes in the second. Furthermore, each of these sets of perfect rhyme contains a slant rhyme between them ("now" and "toil," respectively). It's as if the poem is suggesting that there's always a kernel of uncertainty wedged in moments of certainty—whether that be certainty in the "kind old sun," or certainty in the futility of life.
In other words, the poem's rhyme scheme conveys how the poem stays in conflict with itself. Its combination of slant and perfect rhymes depicts the uncertainty of soldiers' emotional lives, showing how they are unable to fully embrace either hope on one hand, or cynicism on the other.
Although the speaker of a poem is a separate entity from the author, each figure is inextricably linked in "Futility," given its wartime. Wilfred Owen was a soldier during World War I, and the speaker in "Futility" is also a soldier. During his life as a soldier, Owen likely experienced events very similar to those the poem describes. The poem's themes of life, death, and futility are themes that preoccupied Owen throughout his life as a poet-soldier. It's possible, then, to think of "Futility" as representing a distinct moment in the thoughts and feelings of the real-life person Wilfred Owen. However, it's more precise to refer to a specific speaker that Owen constructs in this poem, a speaker who in turn observes a scene that may or may not have happened.
This speaker witnesses the death of a comrade. Initially, the speaker seems to possess a reverence for life, as exhibited in his or her descriptions of a "kind old sun." However, the speaker then turns to questioning life's entire purpose, suggesting that life is futile. With this duality, the poem seems to suggest that a soldier can hold both perspectives throughout the highs and lows of war, both savoring life and questioning its meaning.
The setting of "Futility" is a battlefield in France, presumably during World War I (which was also the setting of Wilfred Owen's own experience as a soldier). There is snow on the ground and plenty of sunlight, suggesting that it's winter and that the sky is bright and blue. The weather is cold, as evidenced by the snow, but also contains tinges of warmth thanks to the sun. Given that the first line is an instruction spoken to someone else ("Move him into the sun"), the speaker is likely not alone, but rather in the company of other soldiers.
The poem also references other settings that help inform its themes. In the first stanza, the speaker imagines the pleasant farm the dead soldier grew up on. In the second stanza, the speaker imagines a more ambitious setting: the Earth at the moment that life first appears. The poem metaphorically describes the early Earth as a "cold star," evoking a barren and silvery world, devoid of life. As the sun shines on this world, the "clay," or dirt, begins to wake up and grow (an allusion to creation myths from around the world), becoming all the living things on Earth. These imagined settings help put the war against a background of immense life and growth.
Both "Futility" and its author, Wilfred Owen, are fixtures of the larger literary genre of World War I poetry. World War I was characterized by a distinct form of brutality and loss, thanks to a new wave of combat technology in the early 20th century and to the harsh fighting conditions of trench warfare. The resulting poetry is just as distinct, and it depicted subjects like nationhood, trauma, nature, and the human body in ways that literature hadn't done before. In fact, World War I can be seen as inaugurating the period of literary Modernism, in which writers rejected the ideals of past generations and searched for new forms of expression.
Owen's other poems, for instance, tend to be far more graphic than "Futility," detailing the physical toll of fighting in European trenches. In general, his poems question old ideals such as patriotism or glory, instead focusing on the gritty details of war that poetry from the past tended to ignore.
It's important to note that World War I poets included soldiers as well as civilians, who had an altogether different but no less profound experience of the war. Some other poets of World War I include Thomas Hardy, Rupert Brooke, Katharine Tynan, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Siegfried Sassoon, each of whom inspired later poets to respond to the wars of their own time. For instance, Yusef Komunyakaa writes about a physical memorial in his poem, "Facing It," to confront the relationship between the Vietnam War and memory. This physical imagery of this poem can be compared with the imagery in Owen's work.
The historical context of Owen's "Futility" is World War I. Millions of people died in the war, so it follows that much of the poetry written in response concerns death. World War I divided Europe into two major factions: the Allied powers, which included Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, and the United States, and the Central Powers, which included Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. Almost an entire continent was at war.
The vast majority of the war was fought on land and prominently featured a style of warfare known as "trench warfare," in which soldiers dug trenches in fields, launching projectiles and otherwise attacking opposing trenches. The dangerous and unsanitary conditions of the trenches, combined with the soldiers' weapons of choice (which ranged from grenades, to bayonets, to poisonous gas), led to a degree of brutality and slaughter that is almost beyond description. Furthermore, these conditions were totally new. European nations that had previously valorized war were shocked, and people had to reevaluate how they related to the ideals of the past, such as patriotism.
"Futility" Reading (Audio) — The English actor Alex Jennings reads "Futility" aloud.
Wilfred Owen's "Insensibility" — Although it focuses more on his other poem, "Insensibility," this article by the Poetry Foundation explicates Owen's larger poetic perspective on war.
The Wilfred Owen Association — The Wilfred Owen Association is a British organization dedicated to promoting Owen's life and poetic work.
Wilfred Owen's Biography and Works — The Academy of American Poets website, apart from being a premier resource for all things poetry, has information about Owen's biography and notable works.
The Poetry of World War I — This article by the Poetry Foundation lists many of the great poems written about (and mostly during) World War I.