Exposure - Owen

‘Our brains ache’

Mental rather than physical pain

‘the merciless iced east winds that knive us…’

Personifies weather as an evil figure

‘**Merciless**’ - pathetic fallacy, weather is betraying (back-stabbing)

Ellipsis enhances sense that soldiers are waiting ‘**but nothing happens**’

‘we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire, / Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.’

Naturalistic imagery (wind, ice, brambles) corrupted by effects of war into something terrible and ‘mad’.

‘**Tugging**’ - creates sense of dying, fading life, pairs with simile, ‘like twitching agonies’ for personification.

Conflict destroys everything

‘What are we doing here?’

Genuine and rhetorical question. Expresses poet’s own feeling of hopeless disappointment with conflict - feels it’s trivial

Creates further sense of soldier’s confusion established in first stanza

‘Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army’

‘**Dawn**’ is personified, not as hopeful figure but through militaristic semantic field (‘**army**', ‘**attacks**’, ‘**ranks**’)

For Owen’s soldiers, daylight only brings promise of more conflict

‘But nothing happens’

Short sentence repeated by Owen at the end of each stanza, increasing the desperation of the soldiers each time

‘Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence. / Less deathly than the air that shudders black with snow’

Owen contrasts sibilance (repeated ‘s’ sounds echoing sound of ‘**streaking**’ bullets) of the first line with ‘**shudders**’ of ‘**deathly**’ air. ‘**Less deathly**’ creates a sense of how death-bringing nature can be, even more so than ‘**bullets**’.

Cloud ‘**shudders**’ (associated with creepiness) and snow is ‘**black**’ - another death-like image

‘Tonight, this frost will fasten on this mud and us’

Certainty of modal verb ‘**will**’ creates clear sense of dread from Owen - no escaping the terrible, destructive power of nature for these men

‘All their eyes are ice’

Metaphor could refer to the men frozen to death or emotionally dead ‘**burying party**’

The fact that it could be either, or both, creates powerful sense of how inescapable nature’s power is

Features

* Voice - 1st person plural (we)
* Dying soldier
* Structure - 8 rigid 5-line stanzas
* Represents inescapability of war, trapped
* Rhyme - ABBA refrain
* Cyclic, like a trap
* Metre - Iambic hexameter

Summary

* Soldiers have no power
* to speak out
* against their own minds
* against the weather


* Weather is more powerful than any weapon