Mametz Wood is based on the 38th Welsh Division during the First Battle of the Somme in World War 1. They were amateur yet enthusiastic soldiers who were ordered to attack a heavily fortified German base. The attack was a failure and many men died due to the heavy German machine gun fire.
Futility is based upon the First World War also. It is similar to many other poems from Owen which describes the horrid nature of the front line.
Owen himself had fought in the first world war. He experienced the reality of warfare and heavy fighting and was diagnosed with shellshock which may have influenced his negative outlook on war.
Both poems address the issues associated with the aftermath of war.
Key Themes:
Mametz Wood:
• How life is fragile
• How the lives of those who lost their lives are forgotten
• How lives are wasted
• Horrors of war
Futility:
• How life is uselessly wasted in war
• How useless war is
• The tragic after effects of war
Form and Structure:
In Mametz Wood, the poem is written in free verse with three line stanzas. The lines are of various lengths which causes multiple effects. It may be to deliberately make the poem uneven, similar to the ploughed ground with the chit of bones. The lines are generally quite long, possibly to cause the poem to flow slower which gives the reader time to think and reflect on what is being said. Using rhythm such as “run” and “gun”, “sung” and “tongues” also slows down the poem for a similar purpose. The use of words with multiple syllables such as “mimicked”, “sentinel”, ”socketed” help to also make the poem uneven. The words with multiple syllables tend to be key words which are therefore read with stress:
“And even now the earth stands sentinel”
The stress on key words emphasise them and add to the overall effect of the poem.
In Futility, the poem is an adapted sonnet. It consists of two 7 line stanzas. The relatively long stanzas may be for the poem to flow slower which gives time for the reader to think, similar to in Mametz Wood. The poem avoids smoothness however, similar to Mametz Wood. There is stress on the first syllable “Was it for this the clay grew tall?”, pararythme is also used – “half-sown” and “Full-nerved”. The use of caesura in the first stanza also aids to make the poem not flow smoothly. This may be to convey how rough the reality of war really was.
Language and Imagery:
In Mametz Wood, language and imagery are used to convey the after effects of war and how fragile life is. In the second and the third stanza, the bodies are described as “the china plate of a shoulder blade".
Comparing the body to china shows how delicate life is. It also may be to add to the gore effect by comparing a dead decaying body to something we are familiar with. In the second stanza it also says “broken birds egg of a skull”. This once again may show how fragile life is and may also add to the effect of gore. A birds egg is an object which is supposed to be protected. The fact that the quote says a “broken birds egg” suggests that the individual wasn’t intended to die this way. An egg also suggests life which once again shows life being lost. The second line says “the wasted young”. This has two meanings. It suggests how the bodies have been worn away but also suggests that life has been uselessly lost.
The third stanza starts with the line “All mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white”. The blue in white adds to the imagery of china suggesting how life is delicate. The final line in the third stanza says “towards the nesting machine guns”. It also adds to the bird imagery. If the soldiers were to be represented as birds then they were trying to advance to something they assumed to be safe, the nest, but instead they were met by machine gun fire. The line about the machine gun is the only place in which the battle is directly referenced to. It is also placed near the middle of the poem and is the climax. This may be to show how the machine guns are what caused this tragedy.
In the fourth stanza, the earth is described as standing “sentinel”. The use of personification shows that the earth is protecting the dead soldiers by guarding them. In a sense it is like the earth is paying back the dead soldiers. The soldiers protect their glorious land and after their death, the land protects them. This may be to show how only the earth remembers those who were lost on that day. This emphasises the theme about how lives are wasted in war. The third line says “Like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin”. The use of the word wound is war imagery which adds to the effect of gore throughout the poem. It is once again personification of the earth. The use of the word foreign may suggest that the soldiers should not be there or may be because the soldiers who died there were foreign (Welsh).
In the fifth stanza it says “a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm”. “Broken mosaic” suggests the fragility of life. The last line says “their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre”. Macabre is another term for the “dance of death”. The Dance Macabre represents how everybody is equal in the face of death and also how death can be sudden. The effect of including this reference is to add to the effect of gore but once again expresses the useless loss of life in war. The fact that they died “mid dance” suggests that their death was unexpected.
The last two stanzas are intentionally gory in order to convey the gruesome after effects of war. “Boots that outlasted them” is a gory line. It also shows how the men died during action. Mentioning the “socketed heads” once again adds to the gory image of war.
In Futility, imagery is used for a similar purpose of conveying the useless loss of life in war. In the first stanza the sun is personified as a motherly figure, similar to the earth in Mametz Wood. The first stanza starts with “Move him into the sun”, this shows that the character has hope that the sun will be able to wake this man up. The next line reads “Gently its touch awoke him once”. The use of the soft words “gently” and “touch” shows that the sun is a caring figure. In the stanza it explains how the sun is always able to wake up the individual. “If anything might rouse him now” shows that his hope is solely on the sun to wake up the man. The last line of the first stanza refers to the sun as the “kind old sun” which also shows how the sun is a caring figure.
The kind loving personification in the first stanza is contrasted in the second stanza. It says “Woke once the clays of a cold star”. This is a biblical reference, and the clay is likely to refer to people. The character is asking, why the sun can’t wake up one person now, if it managed to wake up so many. Later it says “O what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth’s sleep at all?”. The line suggests that the Sun shouldn’t have bothered helping to bring people into existence if we are going to waste life in war. It also shows that the character has now given up on his or hers only hope- the Sun. This shows that war and conflict leads to people losing faith. “O” stresses an emotive sorrowful sigh which adds to the idea of how traumatic war can be.
In the first stanza it says “whispering of fields half-sown”. This quote shows a life unfulfilled which once again conveys the theme of how life is untimely lost in war. In the first half of the first stanza it talks about how the sun is always capable of waking up the individual. After talking about the positives of the sun, the fifth line of the first stanza says “Until this morning and this snow”. The use of the words “Until” and “This” acts as foreshadowing suggesting that something negative has happened. This is furthermore shown by the use of the word “snow” which contrasts the “sun”.
Other
In both poems, the details of the main character or characters are intentionally vague. For instance in Futility we are never told the name of the individual who has died. Not naming the figure has many effects. It makes the poem more personal to the reader as we can compare the individual involved to anyone in our lives. It also shows how this individual will only be remembered as a person who lost his life to war as opposed to being remembered as an individual. This once again expresses how life is uselessly lost in war. Also by not naming the individual it makes it seem like this one incident is a microcosm of a far greater war. The same technique is used by Mametz Wood for a similar purpose.
Time passing has been shown in Mametz Wood. The poem starts with “For years afterwards” suggesting that the poem is about to talk about the aftermath of a certain event. After the first stanza, there’s a flashback and we start to learn more about what happened in the actual battle. The fourth stanza starts with “and even now” showing that we have gone back to the aftermath. By switching time phases, it helps the reader to understand both how horrific the actual battle was and also how horrific the aftermath is.
In Futility the poem tries to involve the reader by starting with a command “Move him into the sun”. This makes the poem feel more personal for the reader as it seems to be directed at the reader. In the first stanza the character seems to have hope that the Sun will be able to recover the dead individual. In the second stanza the character has lost all hope and rhetorics are used heavily. Using rhetorics emphasises how furious and confuses the character is which conveys the negative impact of the aftermath of war. One rhetorical question is “Was it for this the clay grew tall?”. This indirectly asks what the point of life is ,if we are going to waste it in war.
Both Futility and Mametz Wood use a variety of techniques in order to convey how negative war really is. Futility emphasises how useless the loss of life in war is whereas Mametz Wood suggests that life is fragile.
No comments:
Post a Comment