Following on from this week’s homework, you will find a model response for the Out of the Blue/Futility question below. You will also find an A grade example for the Out of the Blue/Poppies question, produced by one of you. We will look at this more during Thursday’s lesson.
Compare the ways ‘Out of the Blue’ and ‘Futility’ deal with the issue of death.
This essay compares the way that Wilfred Owen’s ‘Futility’ and Simon Armitage’s ‘Out of the Blue’ deal with the issue of death. By focusing on the way that the two poets use imagery, structure, and language in interesting ways, this essay will show how both poems effectively convey the futility and horror of conflict.
In ‘Futility’ Wilfred Owen reflects on the death of soldier who has been killed in a World War I battles and by extension of all the soldiers killed in wars. Futility could be considered as an elegy for the unnamed solider and opens with a tender and sad tone shifting to pointlessness in the second stanza. The use of the pronoun ‘him’ in the opening line suggests this could be any soldier from World War I demonstrating the number of men who would remain unnamed and unclaimed during this conflict. The title of ‘Futility’ captures to overriding sense of uselessness and helplessness felt by the soldiers in the face of their comrade’s recent death. Similarly Out of the Blue also focuses on a single person with the use of the pronoun ‘me’ in the opening line however as with Owen, Armitage gives a voice from beyond the grave for all of the victims of the 9/11 attacks. Out of the Blue could also be considered an elegy with its sad, mournful tone and questioning of the unfolding events.
Both poets use imagery to offer their readers evocative and graphic images of death. In ‘Futility’, Wilfred Owen presents his readers with the image of a dead soldier lying in the ‘snow’, his ‘sides / Full nerved, still warm.’ The words ‘still warm’ are especially emotive, alerting the reader to the fact that the death must have been recent, with his friends and comrades around him still in shock. In contrast, in ‘Out of the Blue,’ the death has not yet happened. The poem is told from the perspective of a man contemplating suicide as he stands by a window at the World Trade Centre during 9/11. Armitage writes how the speaker’s ‘white cotton shirt is twirling, turning’, as he prepares to jump out the window. The recurring present continuous verbs add to the element of the inevitable yet this is cleverly juxtaposed with the positive and surprising title of the poem. The word ‘white’ has connotations of innocence and surrender, suggesting that the speaker is an innocent victim, surrendering to the reality of his impending death. Sensory imagery is also used later on in the poem, with Armitage writing of the ‘wailing’ sirens, thereby personifying them – it is as if they are people crying at the tragedy of the speaker’s death.
The structure of the poems is another way the poets deal with the issue of death. ‘Futility’ mimics a sonnet – the structure of poems typically associated with love. Yet the poem is about death. Owen has therefore subverted the sonnet form, implying that death spoils what should otherwise be about love. Owen has also cut the poem into two stanzas, splitting it right in the middle of the poem. This is an atypical division of a sonnet, and the break in the poem’s structure mirrors the way in which the life of the soldier was cut short, broken in the middle of his life. Similarly, Armitage uses the structure of his poem ‘Out of the Blue’ to deal with the issue of how people felt about the deaths of the victims of 9/11. The lines in his poem are mostly of a similar length, until the penultimate stanza in which Armitage includes on single-word line: ‘believing.’ By marking this line out in this way, Armitage reinforces the sense of astonishment felt by people who struggled to believe what they were seeing.
Finally, both poets use punctuation and language to express the sense of futility and loss associated with death. The unanswered questions asked in the final stanza suggest that there are no answers or comforts in the face of death; to the question ‘what made fatuous sunbeams toil… at all?’ there is simply no response. Moreover, the shifting depictions of the sun, from being ‘kind’ in the first stanza to being ‘fatuous’ in the second stanza express the shift from optimism to despair as the soldiers realise that their comrade will not be stirred – that death is final and hope is futile. Likewise, rhetorical questions are asked in ‘Out of the Blue.’ Again: the lack of any answers conveys the thought that there are no ultimate answers when faced with death. He asks ‘when will you come?’ hoping for a saviour to help him. But – just as there is nobody to save the soldier in ‘Futility’ – there is nobody, and no answer. The final line of the poem begins with what should be a question – ‘Do you see me, my love.’ – and yet Armitage chooses to place no question mark. By doing this, he suggests that the speaker has given up asking; resigning himself to the reality of his fate, he instead says these words a statement, more to himself than a question to anyone else.
To conclude, this essay has compared the ways that Armitage and Owen deal with the issue of death in their poems. Through the skilful use of structure, language, imagery and punctuation, the two poems, though they discuss different characters and different causes of death, have many commonalities, both sharing the view that hope, in the face of death, is futile, and the sense that in the face of death there are no comforting answers to be found.
Compare the ways the poets present ideas about individual experiences in ‘Out of the Blue’ and ‘Poppies’.
Out of the Blue/Poppies Comparison 1
Out of the Blue/Poppies Comparison 2
See you on Thursday.
Miss O
miss, the dog ate my homework 