Exposure

• ‘Our brains ache in the merciless iced east winds that knife us’ L1
• ‘Sudden successive flights of  bullets streak the silence.  Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow.’ L16-7
• ‘Tonight His frost will fasten…Shrivelling many hands, puckering foreheads crisp.’ L36-7
• Wilfred Owen was taught how to write poetry by Siegfried Sassoon, who was a friend of his.
• Exposure


  Poem by Wilfred Owen
• Wilfred Owen


  • Fought in the trenches in WWI (c.1917)
  • Suffered from PTSD and died a week before Armistice
  • Sought to write poetry to expose the truth about war, unlike poets who glorified it
• Poem's subject matter


  • Awful living conditions in the trenches
  • Rats as big as cats
  • Exposing the truth about the horrors of war
• Owen was constantly raving
• Owen wrote "Dulce et Decorum Est"
• Poem's form and structure

  • 6-7 line stanzas
  • Iambic hexameter (12-13 syllables per line)
  • Uncomfortable, circular, not going anywhere
  • Volta (shift) after 4 stanzas
  • ABBA half-rhyme scheme
  • Refrain at end of each stanza (1,3,4,8 same, 2,5,6,7 different)
• Poem's language and techniques

  • Personification of weather
  • Constant sibilance (s sounds)
  • Similes
  • Caesura (pause)
  • Metaphor of flowers
  • Rhetorical question refrain
  • Repetition