“Short days ago
We…saw sunset glow”
Since the last word of the following line is “lie” one would expect the last word of the next line to rhyme with this. However the next line simply reads, “In Flanders Fields” which does not rhyme. This lack of repetition is like the great gap of life that the soldiers have lost giving a mournful effect also.
The vast quantities of poppies that lie “row on row” enhance the mournful effect in “In Flanders Fields” due to the significance they were beginning to hold at this point during the war. Although they are still beautiful, the blood red colour of the poppies has now become a potent and tragic symbol of the loss of men in war. Nevertheless a mood of calm is achieved by the way in which the readers’ eyes are directed to the poppies blowing in the wind creating a sense of desolation as a result of the huge amounts of poppies amongst the large numbers of crosses that lie “row on row” whereas in the sky there is simply a lark in the empty cemetery. The enjambement following the word “fly” lifts us up into the sky with the lark and away from the sound of “guns” which can be heard “below.”
The setting of “In Flanders Fields” shares some similarities with that of “The Soldier” as both use natural images such as the “rivers” and “flowers” and the general beauty of the English countryside that is the dominant image of the first stanza in “The Soldier.” It is sadly recalled in “In Flanders Fields” but in “The Soldier” the rural setting glorifies England and gives a sense of tranquillity and peace. However, in “In Flanders Fields” McRae places the reader behind the lines whereas “The Soldier” places us briefly in “some corner of a foreign field” which is a more unrealistic setting compared with “In Flanders Fields” which shows the reality of war in that it can kill hundreds of thousands. The beautiful poppy is also a reminder of this as it is laden with a solemn tragic weight of significance.
The climax of “In Flanders Fields” is also solemn. It is the command that requests, “Take up our quarrel with the foe” which gives a cause to fight. The vivid image of a torch being passed down and the dead’s request to the next generation “to hold it high” enhances this in an eloquent and sentimental way. The dead then go on to reveal that they “shall not sleep.” This gives a sense of life after death but in a troubled way as opposed to Brooke’s vision of the spirit or essence of Brooke’s soldier living on in the “eternal mind” which Brooke uses to convey the peaceful assurance that there is a life after death. Although the dead also appear to somehow live on, its is as though they are unable to rest because the fight must continue and they are in a state of painfully enforced passivity until the fight is fought which is why they will eternally lie “In Flanders Fields.”
Radically different to both of these poems is the attitude to war in Wilfred Owen’s “Futility.” Written in 1918, “Futility” is an elegiac lyric and arguably a monologue of a soldier, commanding his dead comrade to be gently lifted into the sun. The poem begins with the simple command “Move him into the sun.” The person being referred to as “him” is an unnamed soldier who has been found dead by a companion in the trench on the winter dawn. Yet, this is a futile action and will not revive him, but the waste of human life and morning sunshine cause the poet to reflect on the eternal themes of life and death throughout the poem.
Owen swiftly moves on to the nostalgic memory of how the sun’s “touch awoke him at once” before the soldier’s tragic death. Unlike the romantic sadness created by nostalgia in “The Soldier” and the sense of youth cut short created in “In Flanders Fields,” this nostalgia creates a sense of helplessness and sorrow. In spite of this, the sorrowful backward looking rhyme of “home…unsown” and the unsown fields suggest the barreness of this life cut short long before harvest. This also intensifies the fact that the soldiers are so far from home in the same way that the repetition of the word “England” does so in “The Soldier”. The internal half rhyme of these two words also gives a number of other different effects. One effect is the achievement of a sense of dissonance in the distant echo in the half rhyme that gives a similar effect to the sense of youth cut short, created by the line that is missing in “In Flanders Fields.” There is also a long vowel sound in the words “home” and “unsown ”which creates a sense of romantic sadness in “The Soldier” with the usage of phrases such as, ”blest by the suns of home.” “In Flanders Fields,” uses the long vowel sound in lines such as “Scarce amid the guns below” to give a more mournful sound using the image of guns.
Mythology is used in line nine to add to this sense of mourning. It is in the description of how the sun once awoke “the clays of a cold star” that the build-up of anger reveals itself. Owen is obliquely suggesting that it is our fête to become stars but here the body is cold and will remain cold. What follows is a series of three questions, the first asking whether this soldier’s body that is “so dear-achieved-too hard to stir?” Here the human body is referred to as an amazing piece of work which is why there is a tone of frustration and despair as to why the soldier cannot be awoken. The next question posed is “Was it for this that clay grew tall?” The story of creation is evoked and in this line the dead soldier is implicitly likened to Adam who, in the Story of Creation in Genesis, is supposedly meant to have been formed by God out of clay. This shows that Owen has moved on from speaking directly about his companion and now speaks in a general context for all of mankind, by implying that the creation of human life has been a wasted effort. It is in the final two lines of the poem that Owen’s bafflement and anguish reach a climax with the final question,
“-O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?”
This summarises Owen’s overall view to war-that it is better not to have been born at all than to have suffered the brutality of war and died in such violent and terrifying way.
It is possible to see why Wilfred Owen, John McRae and Jessie Pope all have strikingly different views of war, by looking simply at their individual experiences of it. Jessie Pope had very little experience of war: she never went near McRae, on the other hand was a Canadian doctor who first served as a gunner in Europe and then became a military medical officer. He died of pneumonia in 1918and the fact that “In Flanders Fields” was written in 1915 early in the war perhaps explains why his poetry is more sentimental than that of Owen which is full of anger and bitterness. Owen was the most experienced in war of the three poets discussed which explains the fury present in his poetry. He had first hand experience of the trenches and the front line and he also suffered from shell shock. It is therefore his accounts of the war, which are likely to be most reliable, and although his tone may seem harsh at times, it is Owen’s attitude that reflects the actual reality and brutality of war.
