Futility

ByWilfred Owen

Futility (noun) = uselessness / pointlessness / senselessness

Futility… WWI

Soldiers in WWI (German and British) who have frozen to death

Futility in WWI

Key VocabularyFatuous silly / childish / idiotic / absurd

Sonnet poetic form (14 lines: octet + sestet)

Imperative command / demand / order

Personification

giving a non-human thing a human quality (the anger of the guns)

Repetition same word - repeated…

Rhyme words that sound the same

More key vocabulary…rhetorical question

question that is not meant to be answered – but to make a point AND make a direct connection with the responder! “what would you do if it was you in the trenches?”

metaphor Describing one thing by saying that it IS something else. “the clay grew tall” “the sun wakes the seed”

Contrast / juxtaposition

Two opposite images or ideas next to each other. Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.

caesura Commas, dashes, semi-colons, colons, ellipses in a single line of a poem… it breaks up the flow of each line and each idea in the poem.

enjambment The continuation of an idea or description without pause, punctuation or break, from one line of poetry to the next

Read the textFutility

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 nowThe 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

sidesFull-nerved,- still warm,- too hard

to stir?Was it for this the clay grew tall?- O what made fatuous sunbeams

toilTo break earth's sleep at all?

Futility

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 nowThe 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 sidesFull-nerved,- still warm,- too hard to

stir?Was it for this the clay grew tall?- O what made fatuous sunbeams toilTo break earth's sleep at all?

By Wilfred Owen

2. Copy the poem.

3. Find an example of each

of these 10 languagefeatures and label:

a. imperativeb. personificationc. repetitiond. rhymee. rhetorical

questionf. metaphorg. parallel

constructionh. antithesisi. caesuraj. enjambement

imperative

Futility

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 nowThe 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

sidesFull-nerved,- still warm,- too hard

to stir?Was it for this the clay grew tall?- O what made fatuous sunbeams

toilTo break earth's sleep at all?

4. It is a sonnet.

Futility

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 nowThe 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

sidesFull-nerved,- still warm,- too hard

to stir?Was it for this the clay grew tall?- O what made fatuous sunbeams

toilTo break earth's sleep at all?

rhetorical questions.

Model Analysis Paragraph

Owen’s WWI sonnet ‘Futility’ challenges the responder to find justification for war. Wilfred Owen writes a sequence of three rhetorical questions in the sestet. “Was it for this the clay grew tall?” and his final question wonders, almost bitterly, why we were given life since we have wasted it : “- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil/ To break earth's sleep at all?” The modern reader would agree with Owen but in 1918, when the poem was written, these sentiments would have been seen an unpatriotic. The power of the questions is that they demand an answer – but there is no rational answer that could be given.