Wilfred Owen is a remarkable figure who expresses his thoughts and experiences of the unspeakable war and the decimation of youth in his passionate poetry during WWI. His exploration of human cruelty highlights the ramifications, suffering, and the pointlessness of warfare that explores the unbearable agony endured by the brave young soldiers. “Futility” and “Dulce et Decorum Est” are two poems that perfectly epitomise Owen’s first-hand experience on hardship and uselessness of war. Here, he expresses the true meaning of war by exploring the dehumanising consequences through the extensive support of dramatic imagery.
As an influential poet, Owen is strictly precise and attentive in his structure of both poems where he conveys the vision and sounds of the excruciating battlefield that he personally encountered. The effects of war strongly describe the pointlessness and uselessness through Owen’s perspective and this is presented in “Futility” with strong negative imagery. In this poem, the sun is personified as a positive force by bringing warmth and comfort for those dying where its action is all about resuscitating the dying soldiers to life as it does for the seeds.
However, Owen now strongly criticises the Sun as being helpless and weak by interrogating angry rhetorical questions. “Until this morning and this snow. If anything might rouse him now… Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir? O what made fatuous sunbeams toil. ” Here, Owen is angry at the inability of the sun to rouse to what they were once, ‘full-nerved’ and ‘warm’ soldiers from the ‘snow’ where he questions the power on why the Sun created humanlife in the first place. In this sense, Owen doesn’t understand how the sun can give life to seeds but not to a warm body.
This views his perspective of the sun as a metaphorical framework to describe the nature’s ignorance and laziness where it has no feelings and does not care that it creates life, watching the soldiers die in pain. Hence, this leaves Owen in frustration and confusion by decrying the ‘fatuous sunbeams’ that emphasise the waste of life and the pointlessness of creating life for it to be destroyed by war. The effects of war is also pointed out in ‘Futility’ through Owen’s use of metaphor which gives the readers a sense of visual imagery that displays the uselessness of war.
He illustrates his poem with other specific images of nature. “Gently its touch awoke him once, At home, whispering of fields half-sown. ” The sun is being personified and also stands as a metaphor for the giver of life by ‘gently’ awaking the man from his last moments, filled with childhood memories on a farm. Owen seems to have knowledge of the man where he is sympathetic by using a respectful tone to describe his ‘home’. The image of the ‘whispering fields half-sown’ metaphorically reveals that the soldier’s life is not fully lived which was prematurely cut short in battle.
Owen depicts how his life was associated with the growth and vitality on the farm which he will never complete due to the loss of productivity where this tragedy represents the devastation of the battlefield that led to the deaths of many brave men. Therefore, young men didn’t have the opportunity to experience life at ‘home’ due to the dehumanising effects that led to the pointlessness of war, questioning the purpose of bringing life to earth. “Dulce et Decorum Est” is another poem that describes the horror and suffering which Owen personally experienced on the battlefield.
He uses vivid imagery to depict the terrible mental effects that the war had on young men in the first stanzas. Here, he compares the young soldiers to elderly people due to their physical condition. “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge. ” The metaphor is used to show that the soldiers’ heavy bags are weighing them down to the level of the ‘beggars’, portraying their weakened and unhealthy state despite being young and energetic soldiers.
Owen also emphasise the soldier’s condition through simile. “Coughing like hags” explains how these young men were suffering from illness due to the sludge and fumes from the decaying bodies of their fallen comrades as they have been exposed to diseases. As a result, this highlights how men have been prematurely aged when returning to the trenches for a period of rest where they didn’t felt like proud military men marching in uniform, depicting the suffering and exhaustion that the soldiers have undergone during the excruciating war.
The dehumanising effects of the battlefield are also described in Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” which contributes to the suffering and horror that the young men have undergone. In the second stanzas, he uses visual imagery to depict the unexpected gas attack that demonstrates the trauma and tragedy of the warfare at the trenches. “Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling. ”
The use of explanation marks intensifies the threat of danger where the alliterative words of “Gas! Gas! uses a faster pace to heighten the sense of urgency and panic felt by the men through the unexpected attack. Here, Owen conveys the suffering of an brave soldier through the description of the poison spreading at the trenches. “An ecstasy of fumbling” can be interpreted as the ‘clumsy’ soldiers being overwhelmed with nervousness when ‘fumbling’ with their ‘helmets’ as they are putting them on during the attack. But, “under a green sea, I saw him drowning” emphasise the struggle and pain of the soldier who succumbed to the attack under the presence of the green fog as Owen watched him die.
Thus, this gives the readers a strong image of how war can lead to torment and unbearable agony that the solider have experienced. In conclusion, the concept of the suffering and pointlessness of war are strongly expressed through Wilfred Owen’s two poems, “Futility” and “Dulce et Decorum Est” with the guidance of dramatic imagery based on the characters depicted as the soldiers where Owen strongly argues that the point of war for young men is completely useless that led to the wastage of human life.
