Exposure-Wilfred Owen; annotations and notes

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  • Created by: emily997
  • Created on: 24-01-14 13:08
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  • Exposure-Wilfred Owen
    • CRITICAL ARGUMENT:
      • Yeats
        • 'Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry'
    • "Nothing happens"
      • Repeated four times throughout poem
      • Only small changes in the time of day,weather and progress of the war
    • Poem's form is circular
      • trapped inbetween life and death
      • situation is unchanged in first and last verse
    • Influence of Keats
      • CRITICAL ARGUMENT:
        • Yeats
          • 'Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry'
      • "Our brains ache" similiar to "Our hearts ache"
    • "Crusted dark-red jewels"
      • Ivor Novello song
        • "Keep your home fires burning...though your lads are far away from home."
      • fires are beautiful but like jewels they offer no warmth or comfort
    • "Shutters and doors all closed: on us the doors are closed"
      • suggests if the young men went home they wouldn't be welcomed
      • Emphasis in Verse 6 is on "us"
      • The men are compelled and expected to stay where they are
    • Christ imagery (Verse 7)
      • suggests the men are dying willingly
        • "not loath"
        • "we believe"
          • Owen heavily stresses this line
            • Perhaps reflecting own disillusionment with religion
        • for the sake of others
        • "Love of God seems dying"
          • His previous faith in Christinanity now seems inappropriate
    • Half-rhymes
      • "knive us/nervous"
      • "nonchalance / happens"
    • Based on Owen's own experiences of winter at the front line 1917
    • irony
      • ironic due to dying in the elements and not due to to fighting
        • LINKS:
          • "the monstrous anger of the guns"
          • comparisons can be drawn here from a huge range of texts in the selection and from wider reading
    • The fifth lines of each stanza are confused and questoning
      • mirrors confusion of brain slowly freezing to death

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