Exposure Flashcards
‘Brains ache’
Assonance- mental turmoil.
‘drooping flares confuse our memory pf the salient’.
Omnipresent sense of war.
‘We hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire’.
‘Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles’.
Paradoxical, it’s almost as if north is a different war.
‘What are we doing here?’
What is this poem describing?
Hard winter of 1917.
‘There was not a sign of life and the horizon and a thousand of death’.
Name a criticism to the poem:
Yeats:
‘Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’.
What rhyme is used throughout?
Para- rhymes and slant rhyme.
What does the final line of each stanza show?
Anti-climax, highlighting that the men are in a constant sense of anxiety.
What is the structure of the poem?
It has no regular metrical system, but is given rhythm through assonance, sibilance etc.
Circularity:
Circularity as they end in the exact same state of limbo as beginning.
‘Flickering gunnery rumbles’.
Synaesthesia. Delirium tremens, causes hallucination.
Title ‘Exposure’.
‘Myth’ that war is heroic.
‘East winds that knive us’/
Harsh consonant sounds personify the wind as the enemy.
First line:
Keatsian imagery, similar to ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.
‘We keep awake because the night is silent’.
Conflict has become comfort, cannot be worse so the unknown is what is terrifying.
‘Sentries whisper, curious, nervous’.
Use of asyndeton (lack of conjunctions).
Jittery, child-like anxiety.
