The Swift Maturation of a Soldier

“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

And leap at purple spurted from his thigh.”

“Disabled” – Wilfred Owen

These lines describe the extreme effects a year of war has had on the man at the subject of Wilfred Owen’s “Disabled”, both mentally and physically. He is physically deteriorated as a result of the continual effects of battle. Not only has he lost his legs, but he has even lost his “colour” so that the young man who was too young to even enlist, as the poem hints, now looks “old”, and more importantly feels old. The lines describe the reasons the man now feels embarrassment and even disgust with what he has become. He has lost all that he once enjoyed: women, football, even the pleasures of his hometown. Now, he is a disabled and exhausted war veteran, who earns a polite respect, but nothing more. This is result of a war that has left him unnaturally aged, both physically and mentally.

The situation that is described echoes a common theme found throughout literature of war. Both soldiers and writers have often described the incredible aging one endures while in battle. The physical aging is more obvious, whether it is a serious injury or simply a loss of color as Wilfred Owen describes. What is more striking is the mental maturation almost every soldier undergoes from even just a small time in battle. Most young 18 year old recruits learn and experience more in their first few days of war than in their entire lives to that point. These experiences will also be their greatest test of character. Henry sudden and drastic emotional development in The Red Badge of Courage, in which the entire plot takes place within two days, is a prime example of how quickly many soldiers grow or mature on a battlefield. These same sentiments are voiced in All Quiet on the Western Front. As the narrator recounts, the war sweeps young recruits like him away and distorts their entire way of thinking. As he states young soldiers soon learn that the education they have been working for their whole life is worthless compared to simple physical skills of warfare. If a soldier survives a war, he returns home physically deteriorated, emotionally ragged, and with an entirely new set of values and priorities.

Such effects can only come from war. Soldiers experience the worst and the best of human nature. They suffer through appalling death and destruction yet also witness the strongest forms of camaraderie and courage. Such fantastic experiences are why so many writers and soldiers describe a dramatic aging during battle.

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Life, Nature, and Slumber

Wilfred Owen, the leading poet of World War I, wrote the poem “Futility” to describe his feeling of uselessness of the human being. After Owen’s time in rehabilitation, he was sent to a command depot in Ripon, England. There he wrote “Futility” describing his emotions to the war and life itself. The poem is summed up in his last like when he questions whether it is worth it “to break earth’s sleep at all.”

This passage signifies Owen’s use of sleep and nature with life and death.

            Nature is a constant image throughout the poem. We can identify this through Owen’s diction. He uses such words as seeds, stars, clay, sunbeams, fields, etc. These are used to describe how nature affects humans. The “king old sun” (Owen 7) is the center of energy that controls the things around it. The seeds and clay are the basic elements that make up nature. Although nature is a constant image, the speaker claims that nature is not the answer to life.

            The speaker asks the meaning of life. He calls to Nature or “the king old sun” but nature does not answer, but rather the speaker only repeats the question. This question supports Owen’s use of the concept of life and death. The speaker wonders whether he should live or not even “break earth’s sleep at all” (Owen 14) much like Hamlet’s query, when he wonders if it would be better to “dream.” We see how this concept of life and death relates to slumber throughout the poem. The speaker explains his time before war. At that time, he woke easily to the rise of the sun. Now, after being injured, he can’t find the desire to rise from sleep, but rather die. He is mad that the sun teased him into believing there was a meaning to life.

            Through Owen’s last line, the themes of “Futility” are expressed. It represents the use of nature, life, and slumber. They are used to set the mood of futility, the lack of usefulness. Basically, the speaker addresses that there is no meaning to life and we identify that nature is not connected to us as generally thought.

           

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The Separation of Humanity from Nature

Wilfred Owen’s poem “Futility” compares humanity and nature and their respective roles on the earth.  The poem discusses the meaning of life for both nature and man using “the king old sun” representing nature and “him” representing man, more specifically, a soldier.

Human kind’s role on the earth is unknown according to the poem when it states, “- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil/ To break earth’s sleep at all?”  This line, in translation, asks the question, “why does the sun rise to wake the earth?”  Essentially, the line is asking why God has mankind alive in the first place.

The king old sun’s role on the Earth is to provide for the rest of life.  The poem reveals nature’s role in the beginning of the second stanza, “Think how it wakes the seeds…”  The sun’s role is to wake the rest of the earth.  The sun brings life trough its light and heat to give to nature.

In the beginning of the poem, nature interacts with human kind: “Move him into the sun -/ Gently its touch awoke him once…”  Nature does its job to bring life to the earth, awakening him.  God created the sun for just this reason.

God put humankind on the earth to contribute to nature as well, but at one point, the human race broke off from nature.  There is now a distinct separation between nature and man.  To the narrator, human kind does not have a roll on the earth.  Because humans have broken away from nature, humans no longer have a roll to contribute to nature.  Selfishly, humans only contribute to themselves.  Examples of these contributions are war, science, even philosophy.

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