Futility
Move him into the sun? Gently its touch awoke him once, At home, whispering of fields half-sown. Always it woke him, even in France,
5 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.
10 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?
May 1918 1920
S.I.W.1 I will to the King, And offer him consolation in his trouble, For that man there has set his teeth to die, And being one that hates obedience, Discipline, and orderliness of life, I cannot mourn him.
w. B. YEATS2 I. The Prologue Patting goodbye, doubtless they told the lad He'd always show the Hun3 a brave man's face; Father would sooner him dead than in disgrace,? Was proud to see him going, aye, and glad,
s Perhaps his mother whimpered how she'd fret Until he got a nice safe wound to nurse. Sisters would wish girls too could shoot, charge, curse . . .
1. Military abbreviation for self-inflicted wound. describes the poet Seanchan's heroic resolve to die. 2. Irish poet and playwright (1865-1939). The 3. German soldier; in the fourth century a passage from the play The King's Threshold (1906) nomadic people feared for their military prowess.
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OWEN: DISABLED / 1977
Brothers?would send his favourite cigarette. Each week, month after month, they wrote the same,
10 Thinking him sheltered in some Y.M. Hut,4 Because he said so, writing on his butt? rifle's stock Where once an hour a bullet missed its aim. And misses teased the hunger of his brain. His eyes grew old with wincing, and his hand
15 Reckless with ague.0 Courage leaked, as sand fever From the best sandbags after years of rain. But never leave, wound, fever, trench-foot, shock, Untrapped the wretch. And death seemed still withheld For torture of lying machinally shelled,
20 At the pleasure of this world's Powers who'd run amok.
He'd seen men shoot their hands, on night patrol. Their people never knew. Yet they were vile. 'Death sooner than dishonour, that's the style!' So Father said.
II. The Action One dawn, our wire patrol
25 Carried him. This time, Death had not missed. We could do nothing but wipe his bleeding cough. Could it be accident??Rifles go off . . . Not sniped? No. (Later they found the English ball.)
III. The Poem It was the reasoned crisis of his soul
30 Against more days of inescapable thrall, Against infrangibly0 wired and blind trench wall unbreakably Curtained with fire, roofed in with creeping fire, Slow grazing fire, that would not burn him whole Rut kept him for death's promises and scoff,
35 And life's half-promising, and both their riling.
IV. The Epilogue With him they buried the muzzle his teeth had kissed, And truthfully wrote the mother, 'Tim died smiling.'
Sept. 1917, May 1918
Disabled
He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark, And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey, Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park
4. Hostel of the Young Men's Christian Association.
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1978 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1
Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn, 5
Voices of play and pleasure after day, Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him.
About this time Town used to swing so gay When glow-lamps budded in the light blue trees, And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim,?
10 In the old times, before he threw away his knees. Now he will never feel again how slim Girls' waists are, or how warm their subtle hands. All of them touch him like some queer disease.
There was an artist silly for his face,
is For it was younger than his youth, last year. Now, he is old; his back will never brace; He's lost his colour very far from here, Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry, And half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race
20 And leap of purple spurted from his thigh.
One time he liked a blood-smear down his leg, After the matches, carried shoulder-high.1 It was after football, when he'd drunk a peg,2 He thought he'd better join.?He wonders why.
25 Someone had said he'd look a god in kilts, That's why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg, Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts3 He asked to join. He didn't have to beg; Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years.4
