Consider closely on the writing and effects in your chosen poem by Owen, considering how characteristic it is of the use of imagery in The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen.

The ‘pity of war’ is what Owen wished to instil in his work and certainly, this is done through the imagery within his war poetry, which is principally an elegy for the victims of World War One – a war which claimed the lives of 9% of British men under the age of 45. It is Owen’s own participation in the war that allows him to understand the war relative to the soldiers’ suffering rather than the idealistic view of battle espoused by many of his contemporaries - both other poets and the Establishment itself. Owen’s imagery simultaneously depicts the overall atrocities of World War One and the personal suffering of each individual soldier. Futility narrates the narrator’s disappearing hope for a dead soldier to be revived – death’s uncontrollable nature and the consequent inevitability of the soldiers’ demises being a common theme in Owen’s poetry, one emphasised by the use of comparative and natural imagery within Futility. In Futility, Owen displays the collective suffering of the soldiers in the war through the personified characterisation of the sun. While the depiction of the sun early in the poem establishes the themes of life and hope (with Owen referring to the sun as a ‘kind, old sun’, invoking images of a protective, paternal figure), the line ‘whispering of fields unsown’ introduces the simultaneous loss and melancholy felt by the narrator at the sight of his dead comrade. The imagery of ‘fields unsown’ is a reference to the life each soldier has left behind for the trenches and also a metaphor for the masses of deceased soldiers whose deaths have affected those they have left behind, leaving the bereaved unable to move on. If one sees the image of unplanted seeds to be each individual soldier, it becomes evident that Futility seeks to convey the lost youth of the soldiers. Thus, it becomes apparent that Owen’s imagery foremost exemplifies the hopelessness and the inevitable suffering of the soldiers. The natural imagery in Futility may at first inspire hope for the soldier to be revived, but it ultimately presents war as a destroyer of young, unfulfilled lives. This is similarly displayed in The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, where the penultimate line (‘the old man... slew his son, and half the seed of Europe’) also uses natural imagery, with seeds symbolising the young soldiers who die before their prime. The Parable of the Old Man and the Young exposes the inevitability of the deaths of the soldiers fighting in the trenches through the depiction of ‘half the seed of Europe’ being murdered ‘one by one’, creating a repetitive image where soldiers’ lives are lost in inescapable succession.