Exposure

Question 1

Context

Question 2

‘brains ache/merciless ice east winds that knife us…we keep awake because night is silent’

Answer 2

• nature is the enemy
• assonance of ‘I’s slows rhythm down of line and mimics the exposure the poet is feeling
• hard to stay awake reflected by alliteration of ‘w’

Question 3

‘dawn massing in the east her melancholy army attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey’

Answer 3

• personification
• pathetic fallacy
• weather arms itself
• soldiers are in danger from the weather not the army
• weather is causes the men to be miserable
• shivering clouds convey shivering soldiers

Question 4

‘drowse, sun-dozed, littered with blossoms trickling where blackbird furses-is it that we are dying?

Answer 4

• soldiers escape their minds
• allusion of blossoms littering
• ‘sun-dozed’ suggest weather wants to kill soldiers
• illusion suggest they are dying

Question 5

‘drowse, sun-dozed, littered with blossoms trickling where blackbird furses-is it that we are dying?

Answer 5

• soldiers escape their minds
• allusion of blossoms littering
• ‘sun-dozed’ suggest weather wants to kill soldiers
• illusion suggest they are dying

Question 6

‘for love of God seems dying/all eyes ice, but nothing happens’

Answer 6

• metaphor
• God wouldn’t allow this for them because he loves us
• men are metaphorically dying
• homophone for eye suggests their identities have become ice
• don’t become friends so it won’t be as sad
• half rhyme reflect how Owen wants a solution to war but nothing happens
• political message of how he wants an end to war