DESERT ISLAND POEM 6

When I first read this poem in my early teens my immediate thought was that it didn't rhyme very well. When I returned to it many years later I recognised, for perhaps the first time in my life, poetic device in every line. It showed me how poems were more than just rhythmic lines with a few metaphors thrown in. It also demonstrated to me how words transcended semantics by demonstrating a physical resemblance to their collective theme.

For example, the words in Futility are basic – the words of the ordinary Tommy. It is essentially a sonnet yet it is set out in two stanzas on the page, the divide separating hope and despair. We open with the futility of faith – the belief that the sun, the source of all life, will rouse the wounded soldier and end with the futility of war. What is also most noticeable is the irregular rhythm in the opening stanza and the more measured approach in the second – a physical resemblance to the poet’s initial uncertainty in his faith at the onset and through a series of rhetorical questions, his utter conviction of war’s futility by the end. The slant rhyme throughout lends itself to the seriousness of what is a genuine poetic masterpiece made all the more poignant by the poet’s own demise just one week before the end of the war. I don’t use the word masterpiece lightly but there is no other word to describe this poem.
 

Move him into the sun -
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke 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?

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