exposure

• The speaker describes the terrifying experience of a night in the trenches in ww1. It subverts traditional ideas of the glory of war by showing visceral and horrifying reality that most soldiers face.
• Owen was disillusioned by his role as soldier, he was known to suffer from shellshock. The structure is cyclical and anaphora is used to highlight the repetitive nature of conflict
• The soldiers are waiting in a trench, they are scared to rest because they can be attacked at any time, nothing eventually happens, they watch the nature and the trenches which all seem to show signs of suffering, they can hear fighting in the background, dawn only seems to bring more misery and suffering, the cold is another aggressor and appears more of a threat than the enemy soldiers, the passing of time is marked by snow transitioning into signs of spring.
• Our brains ache, in the merciless east winds that knive us... Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent...

  • nature is personified in a sinister way to create fear in the listener
  • ironic that nature itself is attacking the men
  • we could look at this as a reaction from nature turning against the barbaric nature of man and killing them as though nature is part of some divine punishment
  • assonance of repeated 'i' mimics the exposure that the poet is feeling
  • lines are extremely long with 12 or 13 syllables mirroring the extreme length of war
• Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army Attacks one more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey

  
  

  .juxtaposes traditional views of mother nature as nurturing with the brutality and systematic violence of an army

  ."melancholy" reflects emotions of the men and also suggests nature is miserable itself, doesn't want to attack men but has to

  .ironic as dawn is seen as a new beginning and change but there is no change for the soldiers and future looks bleak

  .soldier's suffering is continuous and the arrival of a new day doesn't herald a new beginning
• "but nothing happens"

  cyclical structure shows the continuous vicious cycle of war, emphasises the relentless cycle of waiting for ones death
• owen uses punctuation to separate home and freedom from the trenches

  "Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires."

  shows how the soldiers are dreaming of a release that is not guaranteed and that they are separated from
• comparisons between remains and exposure

  1. suffering of soldiers- remains- soldier wrecked by guilt over his actions, suffers from PTSD and is commonly exposed to traumatic events
• comparisons between the prelude and exposure

  nature is presented to be an inescapable force in both poems, the prelude- "rocky cave", "mountain echoes", "craggy ridge". In Exposure, in "mad gusts", "rain soaks" and "flowing flakes".