Exposure Analysis Flashcards
What does exposure mean?
- Exposed to extreme weather conditions
- Exposed to death of other soldiers and themselves potentially?
- Exposure > photograph > the poem is photographic
Half rhymes - us/nervous and silent/salient
- Makes reader feel uneasy > represents the uneasiness the soldiers’ uneasiness in waiting for battle or even death
Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knife us
- Sibilance > reminds us of the wind? Cold, sinister like a snake.
Wearied we keep awake
- Alliteration, slower sound. Emphasises the length of time that they’re waiting for anything to happen - their weariness.
Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous
- Sibilance - creates the sound of silence and shushing.
But nothing happens
- Disappointment, less syllables, indented
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..
- Time passes slowly
- Still going on
- No stopping waiting or exposure to death
“Mad gusts”
- personification
- They themselves are going mad
- Transposition of their own emotions onto the outside world.
“Like a dull rumour of some other war.”
- as though the soldiers’ brains have distanced themselves from the war they are in, all too real.
“What are we doing here?”
- Rhetorical question to question the purpose of war
Half rhymes: grow/grey AND stormy/army
“Begins to grow… we only know”
- 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).
“Misery” “Melancholy”
- sadness.
- army just inspires unhappiness
Dawn… attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey”
- Transposition again. Owen is describing the dawn clouds but also the soldiers who are miserable and shivering
But nothing happens (again)
- Just waiting.
- The war doesn’t stop, no-one stops it at home. If you knew what war was like, you’d stop it.
Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence
- 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
“Black with snow”
- juxtaposition
- negative image of an exposure taken with a camera
- giving readers a snapshot of war
“Wind’s nonchalance”
- 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”
“Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces”
- language associated with lovers. Ironic as the cold is trying to destroy them. Becomes a personal enemy > exposed.
“Stare, snow-dazed, deep into grassier ditches”
- eyes have turned in on themselves, they are watching their own memories
“We drowse, sun-dozed, littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses”
- 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.
Is it that we are dying?
- Echoes the thoughts in the soldiers’ minds?
- Soldiers surrounded by death, can’t escape
“Ghosts”
- soldiers described as ghosts, waiting to be killed, already dead.
“Our ghosts drag home”
- Home from battlefront
- Soldiers will never return, just their ghosts
“Crusted dark-red jewels”
- metaphor
- shows how precious and unattainable this image of home is
Crickets and mice
- reminded of a summer at home
“The house is theirs; shutters and doors all closed: on us the doors are closed.”
- 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.
We turn back to our dying.
- image of preparing for death
- looking at all the dead soldiers around them
“Since we believe otherwise can kind fires burn”
- oxymoron
- kind fires at home can only burn if they go to war
“Suns smile”
- image of god spreading his love
For God’s invincible spring / our love is made afraid
- image of God in the soldier’s heads as they are freezing.
- questioning god’s invincible spring
Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born
- We don’t hate God
- Lie in the snow avoiding being shot
- The love is suggested as a lie
For love of God seems dying
- Love of God is reducing
- Poet at war with himself
- Faith under attack by experiences of war
“His frost will fasten on this mud and us”
- God’s frost attacks them (capitalised)
- God has abandoned them
“Shrivelling many hands and puckering foreheads crisp.”
- God is making men less than they could be
“Burying party”
- Oxymoron
- Party is contrast - anything but a party
Pause over half-known faces
- Can’t get to know each other before they die
All their eyes are ice, but nothing happens.
- 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.
Structure
- 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.
