Wilfred Owen: 'Futility'

On 4 February 1917, Wilfred Owen sent home his account of a recent tour of the ‘advanced Front Line’: ‘The marvel is that we did not all die of cold. As a matter of fact, only one of my party actually froze to death before he could be got back’. The platoon had been caught under bombardment and  left  'marooned on a frozen desert' as high explosives fell around them. Owen was able to sleep briefly, but he woke believing himself in hell.

This episode directly inspired two of his best-known poems: ‘Exposure’ and ‘Futility’. He wrote the second of these in May 1918 at Ripon; the surviving manuscripts are remarkably neat, suggesting that the poem came quickly in something close to its finished form. Owen was an inveterate reviser, but this time few revisions were needed. 'Futility' became one of only five of Owen's poems to have been published during his lifetime: it appeared in the Nation on 15 June 1918.

Futility

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
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?

'Was it for this the clay grew tall?' The phrasing is Wordsworthian, remembering lines from Book 1 of The Prelude: ‘Was it for this / That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved / To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song…?’ Wordsworth's self-disgust contrasts mediocre adulthood with the glorious riches of his infancy and youth. 'Futility' jabs its finger not at individual agency but at universal forces which seem benign but are only 'fatuous'. They 'woke the clays of a cold star', but the human clay which is the immediate subject of Owen's poem cannot be woken. The sun is what Beckett's Hamm would later call an 'accursed progenitor', its kindness a waste which verges on abuse. The poem's title insists that it is futile to hope that those limbs will 'stir'; more than that, life is itself an exercise in futility. The question directed at whatever made those fatuous sunbeams toil is: why bother?

In this respect, 'Futility' has always seemed to me a counterpart of Blake's 'The Tyger'. Blake's poem constitutes a terrifying argument from design: examine the 'fearful symmetry' of the tyger, and draw your own conclusions about the 'immortal hand or eye' capable of shaping such a beast. Owen replaces terror with contempt: what kind of idiot creator would have gone to so much effort only to see that work squandered by such destruction? As the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran put it, 'There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be'. 'Futility' comes close to proving the opposite. Who would not prefer the unrealised potential of 'earth's sleep' to the gruesome pantomine by which the clay grows tall and 'full-nerved' only to be cruelly and unnecessarily razed? 

N. B. For any victims of AQA's conflict cluster, here are accounts of Ted Hughes's 'Bayonet Charge' and Jane Weir's 'Poppies'. And here is my reading of Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est'.

British Poetry of the First World War: Centenary Conference

The English Association's Centenary Conference on British Poetry of the First World War will take place at Wadham College, Oxford, on 5-7 September 2014. As well as scholars from around the world, many of the relevant poetry societies will be taking part. More details will follow in due course, including information about keynote speakers, accommodation and costs. Please get in touch via my Exeter email address (here) if you would like to be kept up to date as plans develop.

Edited to add: please note the revised date, as listed above.

Ted Hughes: 'Bayonet Charge'

I have already said my piece about the AQA GCSE poetry syllabus and what it calls the 'Conflict' cluster. (I take 'cluster' to be the AQA's decorous abbreviation of a more accurate military term which, alas, cannot be used on a family-friendly blog.) Now I will do my best to help those unfortunates brought to this site in search of information about one particular poem: Ted Hughes's 'Bayonet Charge'. What follows is a set of loose notes. Anyone inclined to explore Hughes's treatment of war more generally can read my essay on that very subject here.

1. 'Bayonet Charge' was published in Hughes's first collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957). It belongs among a group of poems dealing with the First World War, in which the poet's father and uncle fought. Hughes grew up believing that 'the whole region [West Yorkshire] was in mourning' for that War. 

2. 'Suddenly he awoke and was running'. Which is the dreamworld and which the reality? The poem wants to confuse the two: Hughes's protagonist wakes into nightmare. 

3. '[R]aw / In raw-seamed hot khaki'. Here is the first—but at this stage still fairly inconspicuous—debt to 'Spring Offensive', Wilfred Owen's only poem about a bayonet charge. The repetition of 'raw' mimics a similar repetition in line 2 of Owen's poem: 'eased of pack-loads, were at ease'. And the word 'hot' prepares for a poem of suddenly changing temperatures: 'molten', 'cold', 'flame'. This technique is straight out of 'Spring Offensive': 'warm', 'sun', 'hot', 'burned', 'flames', 'cool'.

4. The first stanza is nothing if not sweaty. '[H]is sweat heavy' prepares for the perplexing image of lines 7-8: 'The patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye / Sweating like molten iron from the centre of his chest'. It is hard to manipulate this image into anything approaching sense. Can tears sweat? Why has the tear been relocated from the eye to the chest? The poem clumsily seeks to convey the message that patriotism has given way to a visceral panic. There may be a distant memory of Sassoon's advice to Owen: 'Sweat your guts out writing'. Certainly, the reference to 'Bullets smacking the belly out of the air' contributes to that determined anatomical insistence.

5. 'He lugged a rifle numb as a smashed arm'. Keats said that we hate poetry which has palpable designs upon us. Hughes's designs, here, are all too palpable as he evokes the wounded body. But would a smashed arm really be 'numb'?

6. 'In what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations'. The stars and the nations—which is to say the powers celestial and terrestrial—are cold and mechanistic. They feel nothing.

7. 'He was running / Like a man who has jumped up in the dark and runs / Listening between his footfalls for the reason / Of his still running'. This simile offers little reward to the reader patient enough to unpick its convoluted syntax. The image is virtually tautological: he was running like someone would run if he found himself in the same situation as our protagonist.

8. 'Then the shot-slashed furrows // Threw up a yellow hare'. Yellow? Even the best animal poet since John Clare will not persuade anyone of that. The hare does bring to our attention one curious fact: it is the only other living creature in the poem. No soldiers are mentioned. For that matter, there are no corpses, either. The eye which is at liberty to spot a flushed hare might be expected to notice bodies of one kind or another. Perhaps, then, this poem does describe a dream?

9. 'And crawled in a threshing circle'. Cf. 'Spring Offensive': 'And crawling slowly back'.

10. 'He plunged past with his bayonet toward the green hedge'. Cf. 'Spring Offensive': 'plunged and fell away past this world's verge'. Or, if you prefer, cf. 'Dulce et Decorum Est': 'He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning'.

11. 'King, honour, human dignity, etcetera / Dropped like luxuries'. Yes, of course they did, but even Hughes knows that he is going through the motions. That word 'etcetera' admits that we have heard it all before, that the treatment is hackneyed, that 'Bayonet Charge' is too much a performance, a reconstruction. It has been done elsewhere, and more successfully.

12. 'To get out of that blue crackling air / His terror's touchy dynamite'. Odd that at the moment of defeat, Hughes ends the poem with its finest lines. ('[B]lue... air' convinces as 'yellow hare' does not.) The enjambment deliberately misleads: the reader might expect the protagonist simply to want to 'get out of that blue crackling air', that is, to escape from the battle. The continuation of the sentence conveys the panicked inventiveness of a protagonist who is still, despite everything, an active agent. We are left with the bizarre, powerful image of the soldier scrabbling at the air in an effort to rid it of his own desperate terror.

Hughes wrote far better poems than 'Bayonet Charge'. Owen wrote far better poems than Hughes about the War, as 'Spring Offensive' demonstrates. The question for the AQA examiners must be: why favour the copy over the original?

Postscript: for an account of Jane Weir's 'Poppies', see here. And here is my reading of Wilfred Owen's 'Futility'.