In the poem, Owen paints a clear picture of how gruesome and grotesque the conditions were for the life of a soldier. Through poetic language, Owen offers masterful visual descriptions, and he offers an account of one of his own experiences venturing through a trench and killing an enemy soldier.

I think that the authenticity and rawness of this piece was aimed at the home-front audience who do not understand the harsh reality of war. As most governments circulated mountains of propaganda in support of the war effort, the general public might not have been correctly informed about the war. The ending of the poem directly addresses the issue with propagandist literature with Owen writing, "The Old Lie: Dulce et Decorum Est." Here he recalls the phrase that translates to 'it is sweet and fitting to die for your country' a lie.

Gently its touch awoke him once"

Perhaps the awoke in this context does not mean physically awaking, but rather spiritually. Like after spending years in the horrible, blood covered war zones, this unnamed soldier is now finally free in a sense, and his body rests calmly in a place under the sun. Wilfred Owen writes about the sun as if it were a guardian for the fallen soldier, "If anything might rouse him now, The kind old sun will know." 'If anything' in this case, I believe to be small animals, rain, and natural occurences that might wash away the soldier's body. It doesn't make sense that someone alive should have nearly none or if any worries.

The second half of the poem to me, reads a lot more clearly referring to the wars. "Think how it wakes the seeds—

Woke once the clays of a cold star." This line is pretty obvious to me, the seeds don't stand for anything actually seed-ish but instead, I think it means the undying spirit of a soldier persisting on even after death. Being under the sunlight perhaps awoke this spirit from its long slumber (The war).

The title of this poem "Futility" could stand for the futile efforts of a singular soldier in a war involving millions. Maybe the death of one person matters no more than the death of a fly in conflicts such as this. Every step they've taken, every bullet they've shot, every man they'd killed, it was all futile. The war rages on and on.

Owen wrote this poem in a very cryptic way compared to his previous poems, but I think he did that purposefully so that the reader can have their own interpretation. Mine is that this poem was Owen's way of expressing grief for one of his fallen mates in the war. Maybe the sunlight idea came from Owen himself because this fallen soldier loved the sun.

The second stanza builds on the terrible imagery that the first had created and states the trauma of war. "Memory fingers in their hair of murders". Memory in this case could mean guilt, fear, and rage. This memory never leaves either "Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter" Owen uses past tense in this line which suggests that the soldiers who had once loved laughter no longer do due to the effects of war.

The third and final stanza hurls the reader back into the horrible imagery seen in the first stanza but more directly covers that trauma that it gives. "Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented Back into their brains, because on their sense Sunlight seems a blood-smear; night comes blood-black". 'Tormented brains' is directly referring to mental aptitude of the men fighting and even when they aren't fighting they remember that "on their sense Sunlight seems a blood-smear; night comes blood-black". Trauma to this level is permanent, if soldiers make it through the war, they will perhaps forever remember the attacks and bombshells dropped on them in the early morning, and bodies they had to drag to rivers late at night.