The poem “Futility” is about the discovery of a dead soldier in the midst of world war 1, however the concepts that relate and revolve around the dead soldier play a much larger part in the poems many meanings.
The poem is also set in a very traditional stanza pattern that are of equal length and rhyme scheme; not to forget that they differentiate from each other because of their change of focus, for example the change in positive to negative thought from the first stanza to the second. This positive thought and emotion is brought in by the positive personification of the sun, as the sun is portrayed as a”gentle” and omniscient being. This therefore brings about the thought and connection to god because god is the only other comparison to the suns character.
The second stanza has a negative approach due to the change in thought, so after the character has moved the dead soldier into the sun and he has not woken up the character questions himself; why did he have to die? He is no different to me? Who has the authority to take ones life and why would god put us on the earth (“clay”) in benevolence just to stand idle and watch us destroy each other and raze all that he has created? These questions are the proposed train of thought that is being subjected into the poem and into the readers mind.
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