'Exposure' notes
- Created by: loupardoe
- Created on: 10-06-16 09:21
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Context
- Wilfred Owen fought and died in world war 1
- born in 1893
- died in 1918, one week from the end of world war 1
- poetry is characterised by powerful descriptions of the conditions faced by soldiers in the trenches
- world war 1 is considered the first modern war and is remembered for its use of trench warfare and gas
- Wilfred Owen was one of the 'war poets'
- was diagnosed with PTSD and met Siegfried Sassoon in hospital
- returned to the war and was killed at 26 years old
Themes
- war- how death claimed the lives of so many soldiers
- weather- freezing conditions are seen as being dangerous to the enemy. bullets are seen as less deadly than the cold
- despair- men's loss of faith and death is seen as inevitable
structure
- eight stanzas with five lines each
- last line of each stanza is shorter and indented which emphasizes its importance
- disrupts the rythmn of the poem which uses hexameters (verses with 6 beats to a line)
- first four lines follow rhyming pattern abba
- regularity emphasizes the unchanging nature of daily life in the trenches
- employs the half rhyme technique (rhymes that don't quite work)
- unsettles the reader- echoes the experience of war
- vocabulary is sophisticated
- use of alliteration and assonance
alternative interpretations
The immediate and repeated use of the pronouns ‘our’ and ‘we’ show that Owen is describing a situation he was part of. The individual is sharing in the collective suffering and horror of the war. The poet has a sense of injustice about the…
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