Exposure by Wilfred Owen

Question 1

Wilfred Owen

Answer 1

Avid poet even before war, fought in WW1, died a week before it ended :(. Originally pursued a career in the Church but gave up as it failed to help people as he felt it should. Massive fan of John Keats - his work often has intertextual references to him.

Question 2

Poem context

Answer 2

Owen was keen to expose the reality of war - he didn’t believe in ‘glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion or power’ of war. He believed war is pointless (unlike other war poets like Jessie Pope - he dispels the myths of previous war poetry), and Exposure focuses on Owen’s experiences in trench warfare - war between soldier and nature.

Question 3

Language - biblical references

Answer 3

“Like a dull rumour of another war” - refers to Jesus talking about the end of the world ‘You will hear of wars and rumours of wars’. Owen is making the point that this situation feels really like the end of the world to the poor soldiers.

Question 4

Language - personifications

Answer 4

Highlights that weather is more dangerous than the “less deadly bullets”. Human attributes are given to the weather in: “winds that knive us”, the gusts are “mad”, dawn is “massing in the east with her melancholy army”, and snowflakes are “fingering” their faces. This all accumulates to present the idea that nature is more dangerous than enemy soldiers (he even describes the rain using military imagery (“ranks on shivering ranks of grey”) - perhaps saying that the most dangerous war they’re fighting is with nature). Both the enemy soldiers and nature are slowly killing them.

Question 5

Language - sibilance

Answer 5

“Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence” - the ‘s’ and ‘f’ sounds could be the bullets passing through the air past them, but could also represent the sounds the shivering soldiers make. It’s very sinister - a negative atmosphere that reminds the reader of constant threat.

Question 6

Summary of quotes

Question 7

Form - 8 stanzas

Answer 7

The 8 verse repetition also reflects the emotional rollercoaster they experienced every day: they were exhausted. The same 3 part stanza structure is repeated again and again and again - we get a sense of how the soldiers felt.

Question 8

Structure - buildup + anticlimax stanza structure

Example used is from first stanza

Answer 8

To help the reader empathise with the idea that the soldiers were continuously fearing for their lives, ALWAYS high adrenaline and expecting action, except they just continue waiting, Owen uses a specific stanza structure. Starts with a powerful, blunt sentence: “Our brains ache, in the merciless iced winds that knive us…”. Followed by highly emotive vocabulary “wearied”, “low drooping”, “confuse”, “nervous”, then stanza ends with a very anticlimactic line (often “but nothing happens”).

Question 9

Structure - rhyme scheme

Answer 9

ABBAC rhyme scheme: the first 4 lines establish a rhyme pattern, only for that to be broken down in the final line - reflects, like the stanza structure, the building momentum and anticipation of battle which is never realised. Also the rhyme scheme stays this way through the whole poem, with its repetitive nature that reflects the futile situation of the soldiers.

Question 10

Structure - pararhyme

Answer 10

When two end of line words use the same consonant sounds but different vowel sounds. e.g., “knive” - “nervous”, “silent” - “salient”. Use of pararhyme gives the poem a permanent sense of being nervously on edge and incomplete. The reader is ultimately denied the satisfaction that would come with full rhyme - it is forced to be imperfect, just as the closure of the war situation is denied of the soldiers.

Question 11

Structure - related final lines

Answer 11

The final lines are related - they almost answer each other’s questions. Through each of them not rhyming, they are connected and create a line of thought: “But nothing happes”x4, “What are we doing here?”, “Is it that we are dying?”, “We turn back to our dying”, “For love of God is dying”. This final line is deliberately ambiguous, knowing that Owen had abandoned religion, we wonder if he’s saying something religious here: could suggest people are losing their religious beliefs as horror of war challenged their belief in God, or the “dying” could be likened to Christ dying on the cross. Soldiers are christ-like characters, sacrificially dying to save others (which is the ideology behind war).

(last line examples are in order with some omitted)

Question 12

Intertextual link to John Keats

Answer 12

Opening line mirrors Keats’ poem ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ which is “My heart aches”, while Owen’s opening is “Our brains ache”. Why does Owen do this? Keats was a romantic poet who used natural imagery to explore human emotion - Owen highlights the darker side of the relationship between nature and humans: the image of a frost encrusted battlefield tells us something about humankind’s inherent capacity for evil.

Question 13

Ending

Answer 13

The ending is very depressing and bleak, “but nothing happens”. This repetition of the line from the beginning of the poem creates a cyclical structure (it’s a refrain - a repeated line), which again highlights the futility of war and that nothing has been achieved but pain and suffering.

Question 14

Themes/comparisons