Exposure by Wilfred Owen
Part of the AQA Poetry Anthology, Power and Conflict
Analyse the poem “Exposure” by Wilfred Owen to understand the use of form, structure and poetic devices and how these relate to the underlying themes within the poem.
We’ve captured all of the points below in our PDF guide which you can download below.
Where to start
Analysing poetry can be a little daunting at first, and you may need to read it a few times before you understand what the poet is trying to say. Don’t worry though, you will soon get used to it and start to understand how to approach analysing a poem.
It’s important that you use the version of the poem from your anthology when doing your analysis. The layout of some poems can differ from publication to publication (particularly over the internet) – perhaps some words will have been changed or the stanzas may be set out differently. This can affect the analysis. So, always work from the version set out in your anthology as this is how the poem will be laid out in your exam.
When analysing the poem try to do a little research on the poet themselves. It is not strictly necessary but understanding a little about them and their background can provide some helpful context to the poem which can be useful in your analysis.
Download a clean version of the poem ‘Exposure’ by Wilfred Owen using the button opposite. Use this to mark up your own notes from the analysis below.
About the poet - Wilfred Owen
- Born in 1893 in Oswestry Owen wrote most of his poetry in just over a year, between August 1917 and September 1918.
- He was killed in battle in November 1918, just before the war ended.
- He initially intended to pursue a career with the Christian Church, but became disheartened by this because he felt the Church failed to care for those in the community who most needed it.
- He was a big fan of John Keats and this is reflected in his works.
- He is most renowned for his poetry about WW1, which offered a different insight into war.
- Instead of the glorifying patriotism that most poets of the time wrote about, he portrayed a harsher, more vivid, desolate picture of the futility of war.
Background to the poem
- Owen enlisted to fight in WW1 and in December 1916 he travelled to France with the Lancashire Fusiliers.
- During his time there he wrote letters home lamenting the conditions the soldiers suffered.
- In May 1917 he was sent to a hospital back in the UK suffering from shellshock.
- It was during this time that he began to write poetry in earnest.
- His perspective on the war was different – it did not contain any of the glory and patriotism that was usual at the time.
He spent the early part of 1918 back in training before returning to battle and the front line, despite being offered the opportunity to sit out the rest of the war.
He was killed in battle just a few days before the Armistice and received a post-humous Military Cross for his bravery.
What is the poem about?
- Exposure, is one of Wilfred Owens most famous poems.
- The poem focusses on the impact of extreme weather on the soldiers who are waiting in the trenches to be ordered into battle.
- There is no references to any fighting or battles, instead it represents the emotions of the soldiers as they wait.
- It shows the soldiers are helpless, suffering against the brutal weather conditions they are ‘exposed’ to.
- This challenges the view that other poems gave, glorifying battle, making it seem exciting.
- As the poem continues it becomes clear that the soldiers have accepted their fate and that the conditions will take their toll on them.
By John Warwick Brooke – This photograph Q 3990 comes from the collections of the Imperial War Museums (collection no. 1900-13), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116369
So now we know that the poem is about let’s analyse how Owen uses poetic devices in Exposure to tell his story.
Form and Structure
- Wilfred Owen writes ‘Exposure’ in eight separate stanzas, each containing five lines.
- In each stanza the first two lines are blunt and powerful. Lines three and four then contain vivid imagery and emotive vocabulary. The fifth line is short, providing an anti-climax to the previous four. This mimics the way the soldiers feel, having to stay constantly alert but nothing happens. This portrays the futility of war.
Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay
- Owen uses ‘pararhyme’ (where the consonant sounds of the ending words are the same, but the vowel sounds are different). This gives a feeling of unease, again mimicking the way the soldiers feel as they wait for battle.
- The rhyme scheme itself adds further to this. It follows a ABBAC pattern throughout, with the first four lines building a pattern, only to be broken by the final line.
- The poem has a cyclical structure, where the speaker repeats ‘but nothing happens’ to connect the beginning and end of the poem. This emphasises the lack of action throughout.
- The repetition of ‘but nothing happens’ is also a form of anaphora (where words or phrases are repeated between lines). This repetition encourages the reader to question what the point of the war is? Why are the soldiers having to suffer like this?
- Punctuation including the use of caesura (where sentences stop mid-line) is used to further unsettle the reader. The frequency with which sentences are stopped mid-line makes the reader pause, creating a feeling of unease and restlessness.
Use of language
Owen uses biblical references ‘rumour of some other war’ (Matthew 24 where Jesus is talking about the end of the world). The point he is making is that the soldiers feel the end of the world has come for the soldiers suffering the harsh conditions.
Owen continually personifies the weather in a rather deadly way ‘winds that knive us’, ‘air that shudders with black ice’, ‘pale flakes with fingering stealth faces’. This shows the weather as being more deadly than the enemy. This is emphasised further by combining it with military terms ‘knive us’, ‘deadly’, ‘stealth’, ‘ranks’ etc.
Sibilance (repeating ‘s’, ‘sh’, and ‘f’ sounds are used to create hissing sounds ‘sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence’, ‘Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling our faces’. This creates a sinister hissing sound, threatening the soldiers safety. Or perhaps mimicking their shivers?
Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
Lines three and four in each stanza are consistently graphic, often containing uncomfortable images for the reader ‘twitching agonies’ ‘flickering gunnery rumbles’, ‘sidelong snow flakes’. The final line of some stanzas are posed as questions ‘What are we doing here?’, ‘Is it that we are dying’. This challenges the reader to consider each, question. What are the soldiers doing there?
Themes and comparisons
If you’re presented with this poem in the exam you will be asked to compare it to one of the other poems from the anthology in some way. You may also decide to use it as the comparison poem. To do this you need to think about the themes that are presented in the poem and which other poems in the anthology have similar themes. We’ve summarised these briefly below.
Reality of War
Rather than glorifying war, which many other WW1 poets did, Owen presented war as something different: pointless and futile.
Compare to:
- Charge of the Light Brigade
- War Photographer
- Remains
- Poppies
- Bayonet Charge
Power of Nature
Nature is presented as the real enemy. The weather is relentless and takes its toll on the soldiers.
Compare to:
- Ozymandias
- Extract from The Prelude
- Tissue
- Kamikaze
- Storm on the Island
What next?
We hope you’ve found this analysis useful, but please remember that we all interpret things differently. Just because we’ve read it one way, does not that it can not have an alternative meaning. Remember that when you’re reading it through – you could pick up on something totally different and that’s fine. There is no right or wrong interpretation of a poem – as long as you can analyse and justify why the poem makes you feel a certain way then there are marks to be had in an exam.
We have prepared a PDF summary sheet containing all of the information on this page which you may find useful when revising. Use this when reading the poem again and make your own notes and highlights. You can download it by clicking on the link below.
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Other Resources
This is a list of resources we’ve found really useful as we’ve been researching. Some of these are free, but some are paid resources. Please note that we do not earn any commission if you choose to purchase using the links below. There’s also some more of our resources below for you to download.
- Mr Bruff – he has some great resources on YouTube and through his website mrbuff.com.
- Collins Snap Revision book from Amazon
- PoemAnalysis
- Tips on how to manage exam stress
- Tips on how to revise