Futility

Its format is a short elegiac lyric like a sonnet, though it is not structured as one. It features Owen's famed pararhyme –sun, sown; star, stir; tall, toil – which disturbs the natural rhythm and gives the poem a slightly tortured mood. It is included in composer Benjamin Britten's 1961 War Requiem, which intersperses several of Owen's poems among the Latin passages.