I’ve got a particular affection for Wilfred Owen’s poetry.

After teaching ‘Exposure’ to GCSE students more times than I can remember, it feels like I could recite it from memory. But it isn’t necessarily my favourite by him – I find several others equally moving.

When I read and think about his work, what usually strikes me is the sense of bewilderment it conveys. The sheer incomprehensibility of what human beings are capable of doing to one another. Of what he is witnessing. Not least, the unbridgeable mental gap between how the war was sold to young men and the reality they faced when they joined up. Then, increasingly, that bewilderment turns to anger, an anger that comes from trying to make sense of it all. Perhaps there’s a sense of betrayal in there, too …

If I had to choose a favourite, it would probably be ‘Futility‘.

It begins with an almost tender attempt to revive a fallen soldier: move him into the sun, perhaps its warmth will bring him back to life. But the poem gradually becomes something much bigger, questioning the very purpose of creation, when life can be extinguished so casually.

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

And then, in those extraordinary final lines, Owen seems almost to shake his fist at God:

What made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth’s sleep at all?

I read bewilderment here, certainly, but also accusation. What possible justification can there be for destroying something so precious?

Owen was killed on 4 November 1918, just seven days before the Armistice. The war was still being fought, of course, but its end was tantalisingly close. It makes these final deaths feel especially poignant. He was 25.

I find it difficult to think of that without feeling an enormous sense of waste. I believe his work is so successful because it takes us beyond the waste of a single young life, towards all the lives that might have been lived, and all the things that might have been achieved.

Perhaps the greatest tribute we can pay him is to keep reading.