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- Suffering - there are reminders of the real, physical pain that the soldiers experience, as well their exhaustion and fatigue. Even thinking about home is painful for the men as they're not welcome there.
- Bordem - There's a sense of frustration at their situation as they are 'worried','watching' and waiting but 'nothing happens' and the men are left to contemplate their own deaths.
- Hopelessness - The soldiers are helpless against the power of nature and their is nothing they can do to change their situation. The poem offers little hope of a future for the men.
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- Wrote by Owen in the trenches of WW1, not long before he was killed.
- Reveals anger at the war's waste of life and horrific conditions
- Owen 'exposes' the truth of war
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- Present tence using first person plural, the collective voice shows how the experience was shared by soldiers across the war. Each stanza has a regular rhyme scheem (ABBAC) to reflect the monotonous nature of the men's experience, but the rhymes are often half-rhymes. The rhyme scheme offers no comfort or satisfaction but instead it's jagged like the reality of the mens experience and memories.
- Eight stanzas, but no real progression. Last stanza ends with the same words as the first stanza, reflecting the monotony of life in the trenches and the absence of change.
- Bleak Language, rhetorical questions and personification; to remind the reader of the soldiers pain and lack of hope, to question the reader and nature personified to be vein as the real enemy of war.
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- 'merciless iced east winds that knife us...'
- 'shutters and doors all closed: on us the doors are closed'
- 'streak the silence'
- 'all their eyes are ice'
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