Monday 13 June 2011

Exposure - Wilfred Owen

Hi guys,


Thanks for a fab lesson today - I loved hearing your ideas and it's lovely to see how far you've all come :)


I thought I'd throw together a few notes on Exposure as I know it's one you all struggle on quite a bit. Hopefully, after reading this, all will become clear!


Owen's ideas and attitudes (italics added to pick out specific words to analyse)
In war, the real enemy is nature or the elements ("pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces").
War can kill a man in a spiritual, if not a physical way ("Slowly our ghosts drag home")
War can lead to a loss of faith in God/God is responsible for the suffering caused by nature ("Tonight, His frost will fasten on this mud and us").


Personification
This poem is loaded with personification, and personifies the weather and nature as an army of assassins. The first image that we are given is of the "merciless iced winds that knive us". 'Merciless' suggests that the wind is vindictive and without compassion, whilst 'knive' is a violent action, implying that it is an attacker inflicting pain. From the outset, the 'personality' of the weather is established as an enemy.
In stanza three, Owen writes of "Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army". By personifying 'dawn' or nature as a woman, Owen is pointing out that 'Mother Nature' has turned against them, and that the maternal, compassionate image of a woman has been subverted. In this poem, Owen is definitely using subversion to show how war defies expectations and unexpected enemies attack. 


Alliteration
Despite portraying the conditions of war as vicious, Owen's language is quite soft on the ear, being abundant with sibilance and repeated 'f' sounds (e.g. "flowing flakes that flock"). The use of delicate sounding words could be to show how the weather can be a silent or covert assassin, which seems innocent compared to artillery. Indeed, think about a snow scene - it is attractive and often peaceful. Owen is highlighting that this weather has two very different sides depending on the context, and highlights both by contrasting soft sounds with violent images ("ranks on shivering ranks of grey").


Structure
The five line stanzas are constant throughout, using half rhyme to form a ABBAC rhyme scheme. What is interesting in this poem is the fifth line - it defies our expectations when reading it. A reader would either expect the stanza to finish at the end of the fourth line, or to continue after the end of the shortened fifth line. By extending beyond the fourth, Owen could be showing that war is dragged out longer than is expected. Indeed, the ellipses (...) indicate long missing periods of nothingness, where the events are too empty to be written into the poem. This enhances the impression of time being drawn out. However, the fifth line being shortened creates an alternative effect of the stanza being cut off too early. Is this representative of life being cut short? Alternatively, you could argue that Owen wishes these lines to stand out, as they contain the poem's key ideas ("But nothing happens"). Indeed, this particular phrase is of paramount importance in developing the key themes of the poem, which is why Owen repeats this sentiment several times. Furthermore, the poem ends with this statement, thus showing how the poem has come full circle, and although the soldiers in the poem are implied to be dead ("The burying party... pause over half known faces. All their eyes are ice.") the same vicious cycle will entrap fresh recruits.

  • Can you pick out any effective language choices?
  • Why does Owen use the phrase "black with snow"?
TTFN! Miss D :)

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