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 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?

Analysis

Have you ever heard the phrase, “resistance is futile?” In other words, to resist is futile. But what does the word actually mean? The dictionary says that the word “futile” means “pointless” or “incapable of producing any useful result.” With this in mind it is easy to see just what Wilfred Owen thinks of his predicament in the trenches towards the end of the first world war. He was an officer who was injured, hospitalized in England and then sent back to the Somme, along with thousands of others, including my Grandfather. When Owen was in France he wrote some of his poems. Other poems of his were written whilst in hospital in the UK.

This one shares his disdain for what is happening, his sense that the war has been a futile waste of time, effort and humanity. This then is another example, like Dulce Et Decorum Est [my favourite poem of all time and one to teach to a Y8 group just before lunch – always has the desired effect] which tells all those people and poets like Jessie Pope at home that it is not noble to die for one’s country and it is not a good thing to be killing other human beings in such a fashion as we did.

All is futile; that is the message and one that is shared in so few words as to make it more powerful than ever. The second word tells us that this is about someone he more than likely knew, a man who he says needs turning “into the sun.” When alive, this same sun would awake him “with its touch.” Indeed, being in France, in the countryside, the same sun “always …. awoke him.” Clearly this is about a man who loved the openness of the fields and the countryside, who favoured the sun’s beams and warmth and revelled in its glory given to him by God. He was in life, a nature loving individual who could see and appreciate the beauty of nature all around him.

But now, as a lifeless corpse, in “this morning and this snow,” he resides in the harshness and cold reality of warfare, unable to appreciate the life that once was his a constant reminder to his comrades of the savagery of war. There is a callous sense of harsh reality in the words “if anything might rouse him now, the kind old sun will know” because the sun is the only thing offering warmth on this cold winter’s day in the snow of the Somme.

In this futile war, thinks Owen, where the sun is the only warmth available to anyone, there is the sense of futility all around him, in everything he sees, in everything he does. He asks the rhetorical question to all who would read; to the Jessie Popes at home encouraging young men to go off and fight. He asks “was it for this the clay grew tall?” He is asking was it for this that the ground before him grew into the muddy quagmire or the snowy hell that engulfed bodies and sucked them down into the mud, to lie there forever being churned by tractor blades and rotor shears? If so, then there has to be something wrong with humanity and its desire and need to kill. This is both social comment and political polemic.

He adds “O what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth’s sleep at all?” Fatuous means silly or pointless, so one can see here that Owen is criticizing heavily the belief in the justness and positive status attached to warfare. Clearly, his experience has coloured his views. He has seen bodies blown up, rats gnawing on dead friends as they lie in no man’s land [the space between German and English forces] and he has seen the Shell Shock [modern day PTSD] survivors trying to come to terms with the effects of what they had to endure. His war was labelled “The war to end all wars” which in itself was a futile and fatuous title; silly, stupid and pointless and Owen is magnificently sharing these thoughts with the reader here.

Some notes from the Wilfred Owen Society Website

Futility

The front line on a bright winter morning. A soldier has recently died though we don’t know precisely how or when. Owen appears to have known him and something of his background and he ponders nature’s power to create life, setting it against the futility of extinction.

Only five of his poems were published in Wilfred Owen’s lifetime. FUTILITY was one of them. It appeared, together with HOSPITAL BARGE, in “The Nation” on 15th June 1918, shortly after being written – at Ripon probably – although Scarborough is a possibility. At about this time Owen categorised his poems, FUTILITY coming under the heading “Grief”.

It takes the form of a short elegiac lyric the length of a sonnet though not structured as one, being divided into seven-line stanzas. Owen uses the sun as a metaphorical framework on which to hang his thoughts.

The sun wakes us (lines 2 & 4), stimulates us to activity (3), holds the key of knowledge (7), gives life to the soil (8), gave life from the beginning, yet (13) in the end the “fatuous” sunbeams are powerless.

It would be remiss of me to not add the words of the poet into an analysis of this poem and I believe in the idea that the best place to get info is from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

I came across this on youtube, so instead of adding 600 words of my own, I defer to her knowledge and wisdom.

Enjoy!

Untitled

I am but a line of script
In an electronic sky
A scream in a cyber wilderness
Lines on a screen
I have no feelings
I have no existence
Just lines of script
To amuse or annoy
Or destroy
Merely an electronic toy
To pass the time between
Breakfast and bed

Ron Groves

A friend of mine wrote this poem and it is one that has not been published until now. I asked his permission to share it here because I think it is brilliant. I think he has a gift in this world of word art and should continue this further. Here is my analysis of the poem, as an example to you all that it does not matter what the poem in front of you; an analysis can and indeed should, be written. Try it with one of your own poems, for that is an A Level activity, to write a commentary on your own writing.

Analysis

In essence, this free verse poem says a lot about feelings and emotions that exist in us all from time to time. In his poem, the poet describes himself, if indeed he is describing self, as “a line of script” which is an interesting use of language, personifying the line of script and giving it life as an immediate negative start that is meant to continue throughout the rest of the poem. This immediate beginning is intentional so as to share the negative emotions felt and experienced.

This “line of script “ is something that has to exist somewhere and this one exists in “an electronic sky,” like the birds of the air who have their freedom, but in this case, one that is tied down by the boundaries that are set in place by the “electronic sky,” or the internet based life that we lead nowadays. When put together, the first and second lines emerge to show a person who feels trapped in an endless game of shadows between the harshness and rigidity of lines on paper; black and white and somewhat straightforward which represent the realms of the cyber world we live in.

The use of the word “scream” in line three is one that adds to the negativity felt by the poet as he comes to terms with the pressures faced upon him. To scream suggests angst and the sort that lies in desperation, but to then turn it from a noun to a verb with the addition of “in a cyber-wilderness” allows the reader to see the widespread wilderness that is the internet, with all its cyber bullying and hatred between one person or thing and another.

The reader then gets to share in these negative emotions as the poet shares that he feels like “lines on a screen,” having “no feelings” at all but bad ones to share with the world in the form of social media. There are no feelings, just an “existence,” that makes living intolerable and so he copes by adding “lines of script” that are meant solely to “amuse” or “annoy” those who would be his masters or bullies. Such people “destroy” the soul, they make life unbearable and they do so using the one thing that is meant to amuse; social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. One hears so many tales of people who have been cyber bullied, so this in essence, now becomes a battle cry against such villainous individuals.

The “electronic toy” that is used for such things becomes transposed and transformed into the human being when these things happen, resulting in turmoil and sensations of despair for those who are so ill-treated. This then, is a very well written and powerful poem, akin to any penned by Simon Armitage or Carol Ann Duffy and one that shows the ill effects of this cyber world that we live in. It is a cry from the heart, but it is also a warning to us all of the cyber dangers we face each day.

As someone who was in the Territorial Army from 1977 to 1980, I consider myself fortunate that I was never called on to go to Belfast and take part in the controlling of the nation there in what we now call “The Troubles.” Northern Ireland, for such a long time, had so many issues to work through that I am glad I did not have to share in the pain and the heartache, the conflict that took place. So when I see poems from that country that tell tales of a time within the conflict between Catholic and Protestant, the Free Irish and the English Crown, I am immensely interested.

This poem shares the story of the aftermath of a “blast,” something that happened where people’s lives were lost and roads were then closed down by the armed forces. On the page, as you see it for the first time you are put off it a little because of the structure. It appears to be an odd conjunction of words, where there is a line and then two words, another line and one word; in a way, confusing for the reader. You have to look closely at the punctuation to see where you would normally take a breath. But then again, this is about the after effects of a bomb blast somewhere in Belfast, so just as much as wood and glass, bone and blood would have been spread everywhere, so too are his words on the page. If this is intentional, then one has to consider the elements of intentional fallacy [look it up please] to wonder if his intent is to cause the same confusion as was felt after the bomb had gone off.

When you then begin reading, using the commas at the end of lines and the enjambement [nothing at the end of line so you carry on reading the next line immediately] to take your pauses and breathe, you suddenly see something remarkable; a stylish poem that mirrors or reflects the after effects so well. For example, the use of the words “riot squad” and the sound that is associated with it become the first thing you imagine in your head. As it happens it is “raining exclamation marks” which is a bit of an odd description but in as much as things like nail bombs were used, the picture of flying shrapnel is mirrored by these exclamation marks. It could also mean that when we shout something, or are angry, we do so, in writing, using exclamation marks, so this could be a form of expressive description being used.

Then we see in the mind’s eye the things that are being thrown all over the place; “nuts, bolts, nails, car keys.” It is therefore, a scene of carnage. This is not just conflict, this is terrorism, which then links into the carefully worded poem The Right Word, where the issue of labelling using words like “terrorist” are discussed. The explosion has caused all this and is, technically speaking, and historically speaking, “an asterisk on the map” where something terrible has happened. The line has been drawn now in that city, because someone has stepped over the mark into the world of mayhem.

The line in the poem is “hyphenated,” and linked with the idea that there is “a burst of rapid fire,” one sees the rat tat tat sound that a machine gun will make but also the sensation after a blast where the hearing is confused and is taking its time to come back to normal. Film makers tend to show this aftermath in terms of a buzzing sound, but others more recently have muffled their sound and slowly brought it back to normal. This is what is happening in the blast radius of this bomb, with the “burst of rapid-fire” being things said or shouted as people flee for their safety. The poet relates how he is “trying to complete a sentence is [his] head” which shows us he is thinking his way through the event at the time, trying to make sense of it, but he is in the first throes of shock and so his “common sense” is not making sense, or “stuttering” and all “the alleyways and side streets” which he would use to escape are now “blocked,” but not with soldiers. He interjects the words “stops and colons,” which sounds a little odd and ironic, but the intention is there for all to see; as his mind is slowly making sense of what has just happened and the shock is taking hold, his brain and his mind have been scrambled temporarily, causing him to not be able to make sense of things. A colon and a full stop are pauses in a sentence, so one can now see his mind pausing and stopping as he tries to make sense of things around him.

In the final verse, as oddly as it is put together, reflecting the confusion in his and everyone else’s mind, we then are shown a list of street names, in Belfast, but there is an obvious link to previous conflicts where bombs and bomb blasts; shell shock and PTSD have existed. Places like “Balaclava” and “Odessa” are infamous now for their pain inflicted on humanity, but these are now street names and he asks the question why he cannot escape. The answer is that every move he makes is “punctuated.” Again, we have here a linguistic term, a technique used in writing where we punctuate a sentence to make it slow down, to make it easier to read and make sense of. So his mind, in like fashion, is beginning to make sense of what has just happened. The irony of “Crimea Street” being a “dead end again” is massive, because the Crimean War was something that was fought in the mid 1850s that caused massive loss of life and heartache for the families of those who fell.

This is where the focus comes back for him as he sees a “Saracen,” along with “face shields” and “walkie-talkies,” reflections of reality as the armed forces take control of the situation. As they do so he is left thinking one thing; what is his name? There is a “fusillade of question marks” that follow, as would be the case after a blast you have just survived. It is in this time when the senses come back to normal that you begin to check things out; am I safe? Is everything intact? Who am I and where am I? The urge to run has subsided and the need to find solace has taken over. This is why this is such a powerful piece of writing. It takes the reader through the effects of a bomb blast in a way that no other piece of writing can do. It shows the reader just what the human mind is capable of and it is, in essence, a very powerful memory indeed.

Here is the poem. I will add my thoughts on it on a separate post when I have had a good think because this one is a little odd [to me].

At the border, 1979

By Choman Hardi

“It is your last check-in point in this country!”
We grabbed a drink-
soon everything would taste different.
The land under our feet continued
divided by a thick iron chain.
My sister put her leg across it.
“Look over here,” she said to us,
“my right leg is in this country
and my left leg in the other”.
The border guards told her off.
My mother informed me: We are going home.
She said that the roads are much cleaner
the landscape is more beautiful
and people are much kinder.
Dozens of families waited in the rain.
“I can inhale home,” somebody said.
Now our mothers were crying. I was five years old
standing by the check-in point
comparing both sides of the border.
The autumn soil continued on the other side
with the same colour, the same texture.
It rained on both sides of the chain.
We waited while our papers were checked,
our faces thoroughly inspected.
Then the chain was removed to let us through.
A man bent down and kissed his muddy homeland.
The same chain of mountains encompassed all of us.

Choman Hardi is a Kurdish poet living in exile in England. Her poetry reflects the love and respect she has for her homeland but also the foulness of what happened to the Kurds at the hands of Saddam Hussein and his troops.

This in a lot of ways, is a simple enough poem, but then there are depths to it that need to be sought and looked into in order to understand why she wrote it. As the poem begins, it does so as a memory of a time when she crossed over the border from one country into another. As she gets a drink she feels that soon enough “everything would taste different.” This is a phrase that has a surface meaning of different cultures equals different ways and means different foods and tastes but it also can be seen in symbolic fashion, in a negative way, as she is entering somewhere where peace and freedom are things that cannot be taken for granted. Taken this way, her words suggest an almost ominous feeling of threat as they enter this country, possibly once again.

The words “thick, iron chain” suggest harshness and pain on the landscape and on the countryside as it serves to separate one land from another. It is a border guard post after all. But the poet uses her sister who has one leg in each country to show the difference between the two. The fact that the border guards tell her off is a signal to the reader that as they enter this land once again, what mother calls “home,” is in fact, a painful place, a hard place, a place of terror and worry. This is not the sort of behaviour the guards expect, nor the mother in this context. But these two are children playing at the border post as they go home to the land of their fathers.

Up till now, the reader is thinking that by going home they are going back into something that is filled with regret, but the poem turns on the next few lines as we read that the mother then tells her children that home is a land where “the roads are much cleaner, the landscape is more beautiful and people are much kinder.” This suggests that the Mother sees home in a positive light, even if that is perhaps untrue, but more likely that the land they are coming from, being Iraq, is of no comparison to her Kurdish home, where to her, everything is so much better than where she has been living with her family.

The next line says that “dozens of families waited in the rain,” itself suggesting that the process of crossing the border is indeed a long one, where one has not only to prove one’s identity but be searched extensively before being allowed to pass through. The fact that one lady then admits that she can “inhale the land” tells the reader how strong the bond is with home; it is something that exists within us all and it is something that appears the closer we get to that which we perceive as ‘home.’

It is an emotion that leads to Mothers “crying” and their five year olds wondering just what is happening as they compare “both sides of the border.” It is in that moment that Hardi sees the similarities on both sides of the land that is intersected by that chain. She sees the same coloured ground, the same mud, the same continuity of landscape but cannot see how and why one side is better to live in than the next. The fact that it rains on “both sides of the border” shows how the five year old cannot be expected to see the intricacies of life that exist at a border crossing.

But as they wait to have everything checked and then the chain is taken away, she begins to see a change not only in her mother but also in how she views the land she is entering. She says that a man bends down and kisses his “muddy homeland” in a sign or reverence for the nation, for the very ground he belongs to, showing an understanding in older age of why the man would do that, even though the five year old would not comprehend the actions.

But the final line, with that image painted in the mind of the reader of a group of people being “encompassed” by “the same chain of mountains” that existed before, is one that shows that they have gone from bad to good, from hell to heaven if you like, from tyranny to freedom. In terms of warfare then, this poem seems ill placed, but the title of the anthology collection is not “warfare,” but “conflict” and when one applies that word to this poem we begin to see the conflict in the mother, who sees the old regime and the freedom of her homeland. We see the conflict of the children who see the same landscape but something stopping them, barring them from enjoying it and we see the conflict in the landscape, where the same mountains exist to bring about a sense of pride of national freedoms as well as being something that can “encompass,” a word that can have negative connotations as well as positive ones.

Think about this for a moment, where might you see or hear the phrase that is the title of this poem?

Have you used “the right word” there? What is “the right word” to use? There are possibly more to think about. So how does Imthiaz Dharker mean us to use it this time?

The first time I ever came across this poem was hearing the poet on a video recite the poem so I heard the tone as well in her voice and it was the immediate thing I noticed. There was a slight venom in her voice, akin to Agard when he asks us to consider what we mean by the term “half caste.” So I am left with the undying thought that she is trying to get us to consider just how we label people.

For example, she says from the beginning that the person “lurking in the shadows” is none other than a “terrorist,” but there is a saying that goes something like “one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter,” so we are left wondering if she is echoing this thought on purpose.

Verse two begins with the question as to whether she has got that right by using the word “terrorist.” It is a viable term to use if someone is indeed “lurking in the shadows” waiting with intent to cause harm, but she asks if she has it right. Perhaps he could be the “freedom fighter” after all? We see this because of the words “taking shelter in the shadows,” which have an opposite meaning in this context to those in verse one.

But that continues into the next two verses where words like “hostile militant” and guerilla warrior” are used to take us back to the idea of a person of violence lurking in those shadows. But we as readers then ask ourselves what each word means because there is a distinction between terrorist and freedom fighter, guerilla warrior and hostile militant. It is important how we see these people because some of them may be members of our family or circle of friends.

She asks if words “are no more than … wavering flags” which does remind the reader of John Agard’s poem, Flag, making the reader think towards the idea of a nation’s flag and the term we might then use for a person in the darkness of the shadow life. In this sense, the term “freedom fighter” fits better than “terrorist” if the person is a fellow national. If not, then any of the others fits well. It is dependent therefore, on context, as to what terms we use to label each other.

From here in the poem there is a sense of desperation as she seeks the help of God to assist her in defining this something in the darkness. For now it is not a someone of terror, but “a child” who she says “looks like mine.” In this way, the reader sees in their mind their child, if they have one, or the prospect of seeing a child of theirs enter into such a life as this. We hear so much of the young being radicalized and then going off to fight in Jihad that we can easily see that given the wrong context, our family members could easily end up like this, in the shadows.

Tell me, how would you react if your brother or sister, son or daughter, or wider family member, who you trust and love, were to become radicalized? Would you isolate the person and leave them “in the shadows” or would you “open the door” and let them in to give them the help that they need? This is the aspect found in the final two verses of this poem. People who we deem to be terrorists and freedom fighter are actually, other people’s sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, so how we treat and deal with such people is important.

Dharker uses the words “the child walks in and carefully, at my door, takes off his shoes.” This is a sign of respect to the owner of the house, to do such things. It is a sign that the person outside who is coming in knows something of manners and etiquette. It is a sign that they care, but in this context it has come from someone who someone else would deem a “militant” or worse, a “terrorist.” Clearly, Dharker is trying to make us think about the terms we use to label each other. Labels are negative usually and used to demean people and put them down. But the true human is one that loves and respects, which in this case, is the person in the shadows. And there is the dilemma for the reader!

This is a very clever poem indeed, one that makes you question your relationships with others and especially with people who we consider are ‘different’ to ourselves. It is also something of a polemic on world affairs, subtly making the reader consider just who are the freedom fighters and who are the real terrorists.

Instead of a normal analysis, I am here today to offer some notes on the content of the poem. These ideas, as said before on numerous occasions, can be used in essays, but if you choose to use my words, word for word, you have to give me credit. Your teacher simply knows your standard of writing and will know when it is not you writing, so she will Google the words and find me, resulting in disqualification for you.

Cultural and historical references in the poem

• Palestine Street – a major street in Baghdad (although not the street that Minhinnick identifies as the inspiration for his poem), also known as Falastin Street.
• Poison gas – a term to describe chemical weapons such as mustard gas and chlorine gas. Poison gas was used by Iraq against Iran during the Iran–Iraq War and also (allegedly) against its own Kurdish minority. The UN supervised the destruction of a quantity of chemical weapons in Iraq after the first Gulf War.
• Muezzin – the person who calls the faithful to prayer at mosque.
• Imperial Guard – the unit of volunteers (largely) who originally served as Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s personal bodyguard. The unit’s remit broadened into a wider military one.
• Mother of all Wars (or Mother of all Battles) – President Saddam Hussein’s description of the first Gulf War.
• Tigris – river flowing through Baghdad.
• Cruise missile – a guided missile that can carry conventional, chemical, biological or nuclear warheads. Cruise missiles were used by both ‘sides’ during the first Gulf War.
• Yellow palm – a type of date-producing palm tree that is frequently mentioned in the Qu’ran. The tree’s leaves, bark and fruit are used for a variety of purposes including timber, rope, food and fuel.
• Salaam – an Arabic greeting (meaning ‘peace’) which is used throughout the world, mainly by Muslims. In the Middle East, it is accompanied by two or three light cheek kisses, usually between people of the same gender. It is a shortening of As Salaam Alaykum (peace be upon you).

Using these notes you should be able to write an analysis of the poem.

For someone to visit Mametz Wood in the present age, one has to have an interest in the fighting that took place in the first world war [1914-1918] so this poem is a creation of someone’s thoughts after seeing the place for themselves. As such, anyone who visits such a place as this is usually left with a sensation of desolation. I know when I went and paid my respects at Cabaret Rouge Cemetery in 2002, I was left in tears at the mass loss of life that took place in this stretch of land in northern France.

So it comes as no surprise to me to see such words as this from Owen Shears. He shares his thoughts from the perspective of the after effects of the battles that took place there. In verses of three lines each, using no real rhyme scheme, he shares how pieces of the men who fell have been found by farmers constantly digging up the landscape. He describes them as “the wasted young” which immediately shows the reader his attitude to the fighting and the war; one of disdain for such a massive loss of life just because someone in officialdom said we go to war.

Such an attitude is prevalent in many of the first word war poets and it is a feeling that has not gone away in this time of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, where soldiers are sent into fields of conflict at the behest of politicians and Generals intent of waging war on others. The farmers would find a piece “of bone” or part of “a skull” when the blades cut the soil and on each occasion, a grave would be unearthed. In this field where young men “were told to walk, not run,” the blood and the bone still exist to show us the horror of warfare and Shears is showing just how horrific it was, and is, for those who continue to find the remnants of sons, brothers, fathers and even Grandfathers in the mud and the soil. In essence it is a sad edict on the idea of war but it is also a criticism of those who sent the men to their deaths.

Shears recounts how the men were sent forward, walking into imminent death against machine guns on the ridge before the wood, where the German troops were gathered with machine guns, ready to cut the English soldiers to bits. It is that ground which “stands sentinel” now, to remind us that this happened nearly one hundred years ago. It is also something that we as humans, should never forget.

And on the morning he visits there is unearthed a whole grave of bodies that are laid with their “socketed heads at an angle” to show the grim reality of war. It is this image that the writer is trying to imprint in the mind of the reader; see this and know the full horror of warfare in the twentieth century. Know that innocent men went to their deaths trusting those in authority that what they were doing is right. In this way, yet again we have another poem that is a polemic on the nature and attitude to war. It is a picture that is being painted here, a “broken mosaic” of an image that resides now in the mind and memory of the writer as he reflects on having to see what has been unearthed before him.

This poem, like others before it, shows the horror of warfare in the trenches in the first world war. It also shows just how much of a blood-letting took place and just how the memory of that time can never be truly forgotten when the land keeps churning up the relatives that we lost in Flanders fields.

Mametz Wood is notorious as a place of death, a hell in the lives of so many. Anyone who has been to visit and pay respects, or who has read about the first world war will have heard the horror stories that are associated with this place, so for someone like this man to visit the place and then write this poem speaks volumes to the hollow feeling of death and decay that exists on that stretch of land in northern France.

On another post, you will find my analysis. I would rather just have the poem here, in all its detail. It would be remiss of me to add comments here. RIP to all those who fell. Lest we forget.