Wilfred Owen's Futility

REASONS FOR WAR? HERE ARE FIVE TO GO ON WITH 

   The poet Wilfred Owen was born on 18th March 1893. He died on 4th November 1918.

The Great War, as it is called, officially ended with an armistice on 11th November 1918.

The great thing about the Great War was the number of people killed in it. The figure is ten million.

The number ten million was clearly not great enough so there had to be, just 21 years after the end of the Great War,  an even greater war in which the death toll would be 5 or 6 times greater than it was in the original Great War.

Wilfred Owen was a poet of the Great War. The original Great War that is. He didn't live long enough to report on the subsequent even greater war which was in effect merely a continuation of the original Great War. He was killed in France in the last week of the original Great War. He was aged 24.

In the preface to the collection of poems that included Futility, he wrote:

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. 
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. 
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. 
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The poetry is in the pity. 
Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful. 

Futility

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?

Owen died in an assault over the Sambre and Oise canal, near Cambrai in north-east France. His biographer Jon Stallworthy writes:

". . . he was at the water's edge, giving a hand with some duckboards, when he was hit and killed. In Shrewsbury, the Armistice bells were ringing when the Owen's front door bell sounded its small chime, heralding the telegram . . ."