Exposure Analysis Flashcards

1
Q

What does exposure mean?

A
  • Exposed to extreme weather conditions
  • Exposed to death of other soldiers and themselves potentially?
  • Exposure > photograph > the poem is photographic
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
2
Q

Half rhymes - us/nervous and silent/salient

A
  • Makes reader feel uneasy > represents the uneasiness the soldiers’ uneasiness in waiting for battle or even death
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
3
Q

Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knife us

A
  • Sibilance > reminds us of the wind? Cold, sinister like a snake.
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
4
Q

Wearied we keep awake

A
  • Alliteration, slower sound. Emphasises the length of time that they’re waiting for anything to happen - their weariness.
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
5
Q

Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous

A
  • Sibilance - creates the sound of silence and shushing.
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
6
Q

But nothing happens

A
  • Disappointment, less syllables, indented
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
7
Q

Present tense: Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire. Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles. Northward incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles..

A
  • Time passes slowly
  • Still going on
  • No stopping waiting or exposure to death
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
8
Q

“Mad gusts”

A
  • personification
  • They themselves are going mad
  • Transposition of their own emotions onto the outside world.
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
9
Q

“Like a dull rumour of some other war.”

A
  • as though the soldiers’ brains have distanced themselves from the war they are in, all too real.
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
10
Q

“What are we doing here?”

A
  • Rhetorical question to question the purpose of war
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
11
Q

Half rhymes: grow/grey AND stormy/army

“Begins to grow… we only know”

A
  • adding to sense of unease. Describes unease of soldiers.
  • rhyming with grow and know is in the wrong part of the line. Unpredictable. What the soldiers are waiting for (an unpredictable attack).
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
12
Q

“Misery” “Melancholy”

A
  • sadness.
  • army just inspires unhappiness
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
13
Q

Dawn… attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey”

A
  • Transposition again. Owen is describing the dawn clouds but also the soldiers who are miserable and shivering
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
14
Q

But nothing happens (again)

A
  • Just waiting.
  • The war doesn’t stop, no-one stops it at home. If you knew what war was like, you’d stop it.
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
15
Q

Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence

A
  • Sibilance representing bullets
  • Ironic as sound is soft and muffled
  • Takes away the menace of the bullets
  • Air is more deadly (less deadly than the air) - exposed
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
16
Q

“Black with snow”

A
  • juxtaposition
  • negative image of an exposure taken with a camera
  • giving readers a snapshot of war
17
Q

“Wind’s nonchalance”

A
  • the wind doesn’t care
  • But also, transposition, the people back home don’t care either, so in a way they are the enemy just like the “merciless iced east winds”
18
Q

“Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces”

A
  • language associated with lovers. Ironic as the cold is trying to destroy them. Becomes a personal enemy > exposed.
19
Q

“Stare, snow-dazed, deep into grassier ditches”

A
  • eyes have turned in on themselves, they are watching their own memories
20
Q

“We drowse, sun-dozed, littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses”

A
  • ironic picture of summer.
  • Memory of happier times and the home they hope to go back to.
  • Sibilance is soft > Summer is welcoming. Ironic as they couldn’t be further from it.
21
Q

Is it that we are dying?

A
  • Echoes the thoughts in the soldiers’ minds?
  • Soldiers surrounded by death, can’t escape
22
Q

“Ghosts”

A
  • soldiers described as ghosts, waiting to be killed, already dead.
23
Q

“Our ghosts drag home”

A
  • Home from battlefront
  • Soldiers will never return, just their ghosts
24
Q

“Crusted dark-red jewels”

A
  • metaphor
  • shows how precious and unattainable this image of home is
25
Q

Crickets and mice

A
  • reminded of a summer at home
26
Q

“The house is theirs; shutters and doors all closed: on us the doors are closed.”

A
  • house symbolises what is waiting at home - nothing.
  • As though the soldiers feel they have been completely abandoned.
  • The people at home have no meaning - they have shut them off.
27
Q

We turn back to our dying.

A
  • image of preparing for death
  • looking at all the dead soldiers around them
28
Q

“Since we believe otherwise can kind fires burn”

A
  • oxymoron
  • kind fires at home can only burn if they go to war
29
Q

“Suns smile”

A
  • image of god spreading his love
30
Q

For God’s invincible spring / our love is made afraid

A
  • image of God in the soldier’s heads as they are freezing.
  • questioning god’s invincible spring
31
Q

Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born

A
  • We don’t hate God
  • Lie in the snow avoiding being shot
  • The love is suggested as a lie
32
Q

For love of God seems dying

A
  • Love of God is reducing
  • Poet at war with himself
  • Faith under attack by experiences of war
33
Q

“His frost will fasten on this mud and us”

A
  • God’s frost attacks them (capitalised)
  • God has abandoned them
34
Q

“Shrivelling many hands and puckering foreheads crisp.”

A
  • God is making men less than they could be
35
Q

“Burying party”

A
  • Oxymoron
  • Party is contrast - anything but a party
36
Q

Pause over half-known faces

A
  • Can’t get to know each other before they die
37
Q

All their eyes are ice, but nothing happens.

A
  • Owen distancing himself. from “us” to “their”
  • Not part of the “burying-party” as he doesn’t want to be there.
  • eyes / ice half rhyme. Coldness in dead soldiers linked to coldness of the soldiers who are burying them
  • Returns the the refrain > trying to point out that they can stop this war but they don’t.
38
Q

Structure

A
  • Extended number of syllables (over 10)
  • Conveys waiting and time stretched out
  • Repeated refrain (but nothing happens) reflects Owen’s desire to escape the terrible waiting > waiting for people to end the war.