Exposure - Wilfred Owen

• • Pararhyme
  • Seasonal changes throughout the paragraph
  • Nature depicted as enemy
  • Compare to the Prelude and Kamakaze
• ’Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us...’

  • Double entendre: Wind is so cold it affects organs, reader is occupied by the idea of war: Mental + psychological damage(PTSD)
  • Connects us, imagine the pain - trauma
• ‘Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army’

  • Presented as antagonistic
  • Lots of deathly connotations
  • Some caused by nature
• ’Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires’

  • Caesura barrier between hot is imagined and what is real - not actually going to experience home
  • Punctuation enjambment and separates ourselves from their experience
  • Calm ‘sunk fires’ imagery heightens comparison when dragged back to reality
• ‘We turn back to our dying’
• ’For love of God seems dying’
• ’But nothing happened’
• • Nature depicted as enemy
  • Pain of war
  • Meaninglessness of war
  • Changing of seasons - never-ending nature of war