Exposure Flashcards
‘The merciless iced east winds that knive us…’
Nature is personified in a sinister way to create fear in the listener.
‘Wearied we keep awake’
The use of alliteration here makes the phrase difficult so say, alluding to the difficulty of the soldiers’ lives.
‘Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,’
This use of asyndetic listing creates a rushed, panicked pace and contrasts with the content of the poem.
‘Twitching agonies’
This is an uncomfortable image to visualise.
‘What are we doing here?’
This rhetorical question implies that the speaker is questioning his motivation to fight.
‘Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.’
The use of sibilance and fricatives here create a horrific image of warfare.
‘Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces’
Nature is further personified to be evil here.
‘We turn back to our dying.’
This blunt, passive statement shows the soldiers’ disillusionment with their cause.
‘For love of God seems dying.’
This religious reference implies that there is a lack of religiously imposed morality remaining in the situation - highlighting the cruelty of it.
How does opening the poem with a reference to ‘brains’ affect the poem?
It instantly establishes the poem’s focus on the psychological impact of war. It could be interpreted in multiple ways, as he could be referring to the brain literally aching from the cold, or it could be Owen referring to the mind and psychological pain inflicted by being forced to bear witness to seeing ‘half-known faces’ die.
How does the form affect the poem?
- The consistency of the rhyme scheme allows the fifth line to stand out, which emphasises its message. The consistency of the rhyme scheme shows the monotony of war, as does the regular stanzas.
- Owen builds rich imagery throughout the stanza and then the simple fifth line creates an anti-climax, reflecting the way in which the soldiers must stay constantly alert, yet nothing ever happens. This highlights the futility of war.
- Owen creates an underlying atmosphere of unease through the pararhyme between ‘winds that knive us’ and ‘curious, nervous’. By only rhyming the consonants, Owen leaves the reader unsatisfied to mirror the soldiers’ feelings of unease.
How does the structure affect the poem?
- It uses a chaotic structure to mirror the chaos and panic of war.
- It’s cyclical, the last line of the first and last stanzas is ‘but nothing happens’ which emphasises the fact that nothing actually happened.
- The first three lines end with ellipses (‘east winds that knive us…’ , ‘the night is silent…’ and ‘our memory of the salient…’) to emphasise the waiting and boredom of the soldiers. Owen’s use of ellipsis slows the pace of the poem to force the reader to experience the same frustration as the soldiers due to their suffering being stretched out with time.
How does language affect the poem?
- There are religious references, and Owen presents the soldiers to be carrying out their moral duty to protect the innocent people at home (‘since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn’). He also says ‘for love of God seems dying’ which shows the selflessness of the soldiers by associating Christianity with morality, and is similar to the idea of Jesus suffering and dying to save humanity. Similarly, the soldiers accept their death (‘we turn back to our dying’).
- Sibilance is used in ‘successive flights of bullets streak the silence’ to position nature as the enemy. The sibilant consonants mirror the sound of gunfire.
What poems should it be compared to?
- The prelude - in both, nature is presented to be an inescapable force. However, Wordsworth gives nature power due to its great expanse, whereas Owen gives nature its power in ‘Exposure’ by its sheer aggression which is created by the violent connotations in its language.
- Charge of the Light Brigade - Tennyson is critical of military leaders’ decisions, and Owen is similarly negative and creates this effect by depicting the soldiers as isolated. Both poets repeat phrases to criticise how violence and military mistakes continue to repeat themselves. However, as Tennyson was poet laureate at the time, he would not have been able to be outwardly critical of the government hence why the poem contains lexis from the semantic field of propaganda (‘glory’, ‘honour’ and ‘noble). Owen did not have these restrictions as he was a soldier on the front line at the time of writing it.
- Bayonet Charge - both poets depict soldiers who have reached the battlefield and realised that it is largely different to what they have been ‘sold’. Owen uses a rhetorical question (‘what are we doing here?’) to show this and Hughes uses the smashed arm simile. The psychological effect of fighting is also addressed in both poems. However, in ‘Exposure’, the soldier seems relatively prepared to fight, shown by the repetition of ‘nothing happens’, whereas the soldier in ‘Bayonet Charge’ ‘almost stopped’, showing his extreme reluctance.
