Futility by Wilfred Owen

It's about a soldier who has just died on the Western Front. The speaker urges his comrades to move the body into the sunlight, wishing that the warmth might somehow bring him back — the same sun that always greeted him at home. When it becomes obvious that the sun can't help, the poem bursts into a bigger question: why did life emerge in the first place if war can wipe it out so easily?

Futility refers to pointlessness — the condition of attempting something that simply cannot succeed. In the poem, it works on two levels. First, there's the pointless act of moving a dead man into the sunlight, as if that could somehow revive him. Second, and more profoundly, Owen suggests that the whole endeavor of creating life on Earth was wasted if it culminates in this way.

Pararhyme (also known as half-rhyme or slant rhyme) occurs when two words have matching consonant sounds but different vowel sounds, creating an almost rhyme that feels incomplete. Owen uses pairs like "once" and "France," "star" and "stir," and "tall" and "toil." This technique creates an unsettling effect; your ear anticipates a pleasing rhyme but instead hears something that feels slightly off. It's a formal method that reflects the poem's themes — a world where elements that should function (like the sun, life, and nature) have ceased to work properly.

Owen doesn’t mention the speaker’s name or rank. He comes across as just another soldier—someone who knew this man, who understood that the sun once woke him, and who recognizes he came from a farming background. This anonymity serves a purpose: it could be any soldier grieving for another. The sorrow is universal, not personal.

This is the emotional heart of the poem. "Clay" ties back to the biblical notion that God created humans from the earth, as well as to the scientific fact that life developed from inorganic matter over billions of years. "Grew tall" reflects the lengthy, gradual miracle of this journey — from single cells to a complete human being. Owen is questioning: did all that effort, all that time, all that biological complexity exist just for a young man to be killed in a trench? The implied answer is a horrified yes.

Owen is widely recognized for poems such as "Dulce et Decorum Est," which employs striking and graphic imagery to criticize the glorification of war. In contrast, "Futility" takes a quieter, more philosophical approach. There are no gas attacks or detailed descriptions of mangled bodies. Instead, Owen steps back to pose a profound question about the value of life itself. This poem is arguably his most despairing, as the anger is directed not only at war and politicians but at existence itself.

It has fourteen lines, the standard count for a sonnet, but Owen twists the form. The two stanzas consist of seven lines each and stray from the expected Petrarchan or Shakespearean rhyme schemes. Instead of true rhymes, Owen employs pararhymes throughout. He takes the essence of the sonnet form — typically linked to love poetry — and empties it out, underscoring the poem's theme of things that ought to function but fail.

Owen wrote the poem in May 1918 while he was stationed in France. It appeared in The Nation on 15 June 1918, which means it was one of just five poems he managed to get published during his lifetime. Tragically, he was killed on 4 November 1918, just a week before the Armistice brought an end to the war.