Compare how the results of war are shown in Futility and one other poem from Conflict
In Futility and Come on, Come back, we see the damaging and horrific results of past wars and future wars. Futility clearly illustrates how war affects the living, how it makes them contemplate life, how it makes you question everything, particularly existence. In Come on, Come back, we see how war devastates the mind, how it leaves people longing for peace and salvation, even if they can’t remember what it is they have done or seen.
To begin, Owen uses the structure of Futility to convey a single event and the subsequent thoughts it evokes. He uses the simple sonnet form to find the essence of what a death brings to him – the feeling of utter pointlessness. Even though it is much more brief than Come on, Come back, he emphasises the feelings of emptiness that death can bring. He uses half-rhyme to create a disjointed, unnatural feel that makes the poem feel strange and creates a strange disjointed harmony. It doesn’t quite sound right. This is superbly appropriate for the subject itself. Even though the dead soldier looks as if he is just sleeping, he isn’t. It isn’t quite right. He also builds on the series of questions he asks in the poem to build up to the most profound of all: “Oh what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth’s sleep at all?” Here we see how he cannot understand why the universe bothered to raise anything, to build a civilisation, when it is all for nothing. We destroy each other.
Although Come on, Come back is a narrative poem, it still uses the structure to build up to a climax, just as Owen did. The line lengths and the way the lines fall, as well as the odd rhymes of ‘stone’ in the first stanza are also disjointed and fragmented. Thus we see how the poet uses rhythm and rhyme to create a sense of a fragmented, confused, disharmonious world.
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