Exposure

• Exposure Context - Wilfred Owen


  Born 1893

  Joined British Army 1915, died in Battle 1918

  Pursued a career in church but gave up because he felt the church failed to care for those locally

  British attitude toward war in 1914 was seen as honourable and exciting Owen attitude to saw war as pointless and futile. He was very keen to expose the reality of war.
• Exposure - John keats link

  John keats was a romantic poet. He used imagery of nature to explore human emotions. Owen is highlighting the darker side of this, where the natural world of a frosted battlefield shows humankinds inherent capacity for evil.

  John Keats opening line to poem Ode to a nightingale was 'My heart aches'. (Keats' heart was aching with happiness as the bird sung)

  Opening line to Exposure 'our brains ache' (soldiers are numb through the bitter cold)
• Exposure John keats link


  The allusion to the keats poem is Owens way of expressing that if you witness evil, you have to express that evil through poetry. The idea that a true poet must be truthful.
• Exposure quotes and analysis

  Winds that knive us

  Madgusts

  Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army

  Air that shudders with Black ice

  Pale flakes with fingering stealth faces

  • This overwhelming use of personification presents the idea that nature is more deadly than enemy soldiers.
• Exposure quotes and analysis

  'Knive us' 'Silent' 'Salient' 'Nervous'

  • The way in which the first four lines establish a rhyme pattern for that to be broken down in the final line reflects the building momentum and anticipation of battle
  • The use of pararhyme (two ends of the words contain the same consonant sound but not the same vowels) gives the poem a permanent sense of nervousness, tension, on edge. The perfection and closure of full rhyme has denied the poem just as the perfection and closure of the situation in the war has denied the soldiers.
• Exposure quotes and analysis 


  'But nothing happens'

  • In Every last verse of Every stanza
  • The cyclical structure highlights the futility of the war, the fact that nothing has been achieved. They're just slowly dying
• Exposure quotes and analysis 


  'What are we doing here?'

  'Is it that we are dying?'

  'We turn back to our dying'

  'For love of God is dying'

  • In another of Owens poems 'Greater Love' he writes 'God seems not to care'. That backs up the idea of war causing mankind to question the existence of God

  Stanza ending relate to each other and the last response is deliberately ambiguous. Owen rejected the church so this could suggest people are losing their religious beliefs when exposed to the horrors of war.
• Exposure quotes and analysis

  What are we doing here?' 'Is it that we are dying?'

  'We turn back to our dying'

  'For love of God is dying'

  This is a reference to Christ's death on the cross. This corresponds to the Christian belief that Jesus came to the world to die for our sins. In This case, Owen is saying that soldiers are like christ figures in the way they are sacrificing to die to save others.
• Exposure quotes and analysis and structure

  Caesura is heavily used in Exposure. Thus excessive punctuation usage creates a divide on each line reflecting the divide caused by war between those at home and the present setting for the soldiers in the freezing cold.

  'Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence'

  The use of sibilance mimics the sound of bullets and shivering creating a negative atmosphere that reminds the reader of the constant threat of the environment the soldiers are in.
• Exposure quotes and analysis

  'Like a dull rumour of some other war'- deliberate reference to the Biblical idea concerning the end of the w ( Jesus 'you will hear of wars and rumours of wars')