Exposure Analysis

Question 1

What does exposure mean?

Answer 1

• Exposed to extreme weather conditions
• Exposed to death of other soldiers and themselves potentially?
• Exposure > photograph > the poem is photographic

Question 2

Half rhymes - us/nervous and silent/salient

Answer 2

• Makes reader feel uneasy > represents the uneasiness the soldiers’ uneasiness in waiting for battle or even death

Question 3

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

Answer 3

• Sibilance > reminds us of the wind? Cold, sinister like a snake.

Question 4

Wearied we keep awake

Answer 4

• Alliteration, slower sound. Emphasises the length of time that they’re waiting for anything to happen - their weariness.

Question 5

Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous

Answer 5

• Sibilance - creates the sound of silence and shushing.

Question 6

But nothing happens

Answer 6

• Disappointment, less syllables, indented

Question 7

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..

Answer 7

• Time passes slowly
• Still going on
• No stopping waiting or exposure to death

Question 8

“Mad gusts”

Answer 8

• personification
• They themselves are going mad
• Transposition of their own emotions onto the outside world.

Question 9

“Like a dull rumour of some other war.”

Answer 9

• as though the soldiers’ brains have distanced themselves from the war they are in, all too real.

Question 10

“What are we doing here?”

Answer 10

• Rhetorical question to question the purpose of war

Question 11

Half rhymes: grow/grey AND stormy/army

“Begins to grow… we only know”

Answer 11

• 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).

Question 12

“Misery” “Melancholy”

Answer 12

• sadness.
• army just inspires unhappiness

Question 13

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

Answer 13

• Transposition again. Owen is describing the dawn clouds but also the soldiers who are miserable and shivering

Question 14

But nothing happens (again)

Answer 14

• Just waiting.
• The war doesn’t stop, no-one stops it at home. If you knew what war was like, you’d stop it.

Question 15

Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence

Answer 15

• 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

Question 16

“Black with snow”

Answer 16

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

Question 17

“Wind’s nonchalance”

Answer 17

• 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”

Question 18

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

Answer 18

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

Question 19

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

Answer 19

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

Question 20

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

Answer 20

• 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.

Question 21

Is it that we are dying?

Answer 21

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

Question 22

“Ghosts”

Answer 22

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

Question 23

“Our ghosts drag home”

Answer 23

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

Question 24

“Crusted dark-red jewels”

Answer 24

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

Question 25

Crickets and mice

Answer 25

• reminded of a summer at home

Question 26

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

Answer 26

• 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.

Question 27

We turn back to our dying.

Answer 27

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

Question 28

“Since we believe otherwise can kind fires burn”

Answer 28

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

Question 29

“Suns smile”

Answer 29

• image of god spreading his love

Question 30

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

Answer 30

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

Question 31

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

Answer 31

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

Question 32

For love of God seems dying

Answer 32

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

Question 33

“His frost will fasten on this mud and us”

Answer 33

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

Question 34

“Shrivelling many hands and puckering foreheads crisp.”

Answer 34

• God is making men less than they could be

Question 35

“Burying party”

Answer 35

• Oxymoron
• Party is contrast - anything but a party

Question 36

Pause over half-known faces

Answer 36

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

Question 37

All their eyes are ice, but nothing happens.

Answer 37

• 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.

Question 38

Structure

Answer 38

• 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.