Exposure by Wilfred Owen
- Created by: ECranshaw1
- Created on: 01-03-23 15:35
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- Exposure by Wilfred Owen
- Context
- Wilfred Owen, 1893- 4th November 1918, solider in WW1
- Treated for PTSD in 1917/1918 at Craiglockhart, Edinburgh where he met Sassoon.
- ""holes/into grassier ditches"- references to the trenches they were fighting in and from.
- "the wire like twitching agonies of men among its brambles" - Barbed wire strung between the two sides in the area known as No Man's Land.
- Wilfred Owen, 1893- 4th November 1918, solider in WW1
- Language
- Present Tense- "knive us"- creates immediacy and contributes to the sense of it all never-ending
- Assonance- ""slowly our ghosts drag home"
- Rhetorical Question "What are we doing here?"
- repetition - "but noting happens"
- tripartite listing - "war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy"
- "On child, or field or fruit"
- Personification - "pale flakes with ********* stealth come feeling for our faces" - snow is seen in a sinister way highlighting its invasive and personal attack
- metaphor
- "all their eyes are ice"
- "low drooping flares" - for soldiers themselves
- sibilance- "Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence" - makes bullets sound soft, reducing the threat
- personification- "ranks on ranks of shivering grey" - weather compares it to the beleaguered army.
- Form and Structure
- Viewpoint- "Our"- Written as all the soldiers, showing it isn't just one individual's opinion or experience.
- Structure "littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses" movement of time from winter to spring./thaw but no change in the soldier's expereiences.
- form: use of near-rhyme, a refrain-like repetition. hissing sibilance and discordant alliteration echo the themes of misery and fear of dying from exposure.
- Theme
- "Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army"- Dawn usually beautiful and benign in literature, is here seen as the enemy.
- "Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow" The environment and weather seem more of a threat than the war at this point.
- "some other war" The presentation of war seems unreal, as the soldiers are so entrenched in their immediate physical suffering and unable to connect to anything else.
- "innocent mice"- Nature has taken over their homes as well as attacking them on the battlefield.
- "Therefore were born, for love of God seems dying"- Soldiers have lost all hope and accept what they see as their fate.
- "the mud and us" - Soldiers have become part of the landscape along with the "mud".
- Context
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