An Analysis of "Exposure" by Wilfred Owen
In Virginia
Woolf’s classic novel To the Lighthouse
(1927), the death of one of the characters during World War I is described in
the following short, nasty and brutal manner: “A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty
young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death,
mercifully, was instantaneous.” Just like the explosion itself, this passage is
over in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing but death and grief. Although it
is tempting to focus on these brief and violent situations, war is, according
to an old saying, long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer
terror; how can literature describe boredom while still being compelling? This
was what iconic Great War poet Wilfred Owen attempted to do in the poem
“Exposure” from 1918 in which a frontline soldier, shivering in the cold,
begins to ask questions and long for home. In this paper, this poem will be
analyzed and interpreted, focusing on the message and atmosphere and how these
are supported by rhyme, rhythm, and imagery.
The title
“Exposure” obviously is a term that refers to being exposed to the elements and
at the mercy of the weather – in this particular case the cold as an enemy.
However, it could also hint that the soldiers are “naked” and vulnerable or
that all of their thoughts are exposed over the course of the poem. The latter
might be true as the reader follows the thoughts of the speaker, who in this
case is in the first person plural, as it may be seen in “we keep awake because
the night is silent”[1]
and “we turn back to our dying.”[2]
Using this simple trick, Owen turns the speaker into a common identity and a
voice on behalf of all of the soldiers, and the message is anything but
positive.
As noted
above, the soldiers are “awake because the night is silent,” something that
underlines how surreal everything is compared to everyday life – and perhaps
even to the normal perception of war. Of the eight stanzas in the poem, numbers
1, 3, 4 and 8 all end with the same line “But nothing happens,” which
emphasizes the point about boredom or at least a lack of action with “but”
signifying that something should
happen. The German enemy is almost invisible, and the rumbling of artillery is
“Far off, like a dull rumour of another war.”[3]
Clearly, no combat is about to take place; yet in spite of these “moments of
sheer terror” being far away, the soldiers still face a terrifying foe: Nature.
It is ironic that this great inspiration for generations of poets should ever be
an enemy, but here it is actually personified. Lines such as “Merciless iced
east winds,”[4]
“mad gusts tugging on the wire”[5]
and “Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces”[6]
show nature as an unforgiving and unpredictable force chasing the soldiers, who
are forced to hide in holes like animals. A particularly noteworthy line is
when a personified dawn amasses “her melancholy army, attacks once more in
ranks on shivering ranks of grey.”[7]
Here, a new day only brings gloom in the form of clouds clad in the same grey
colour as the unseen German army. It is quite understandable that the speaker
chooses to ask the simple question “What are we doing here?”[8]
In an attempt to find solace, the soldiers let their thoughts (or “ghosts,”[9]
showing that they are nearer death than life) wander home. However, there they
only find “Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors are closed,” meaning
that there is no sympathy or understanding to find at home. In addition, the
soldiers are so far removed from normal life that their only option, even in
dreams, is to return to the battlefield, because only in that way may “kind
fires burn.”[10]
Nevertheless, the speaker shows how the soldiers lose faith in the line “For
love of God seems dying.”[11]
Indeed, in the final stanza, “His frost”[12]
(i.e., God’s) has claimed the lives of several soldiers. The laconic ending of
the poem, “But nothing happens,” shows how these deaths provoke no reaction
even as their ghastly, icy eyes stare into eternity in a nightmarish fashion. All
of this combined creates an atmosphere marked by uncertainty and nervousness
where nature is the true, malevolent enemy in war, death is ignored, home is no
longer a welcoming place and nobody cares about soldiers suffering a slow and
agonizing death in the mud.
In order to
make the slow, silent events in “Exposure” more vivid when read aloud, Owen
uses a few literary devices such as similes and alliteration. Similes are
efficient as a way of controlling the images in the reader’s mind, and one obvious
example here is “the mad gusts tugging at the wire, like twitching agonies of
men.”[13]
Here, the personified madness of nature is likened to dying men stuck in the
barbed wire, which underlines the aforementioned feeling of slow, painful death
throughout the poem. Another simile (or at least comparison) is used to show
that a burst from a machinegun is “less deadly than the air that shudders black
with snow,”[14]
where the contrast of black snow augments the feeling that something is wrong.
Speaking of the machinegun, Owen cleverly creates alliteration: “Sudden
successive flights of bullets streak the silence.”[15]
When read aloud, the repeated use of s’es creates a sound reminiscent of
bullets whistling past. This form of alliteration appears to be a typical trait
for Owen since it can also be found in “Anthem for Doomed Youth” (“the
stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle”) and “The Last Laugh” (“The Bullets chirped –
In vain! vain! vain!”). In every case, it transports the reader into the
battlefield and its sounds.
Two
additional aspects which add to the impression of something strange happening
in “Exposure” are rhythm and rhyme. The poem has no consistent rhythm, which is
consistent with its tense and insecure atmosphere; this is not Burton’s
strictly and classically iambic “The Game,” in which the constant rhythm sounds
like soldiers on the march forward. In “Exposure,” the thoughts darting back
and forth are represented by a mix of iambs and trochees, with the most
consistent line ironically being the machinegun fire: “Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.” (The stressed syllables are
marked in bold.) By beginning the line with a stressed syllable and using a
trochaic rhythm, Owen starts with a sharp sound and creates a staccato-like
diction much akin to the rattling of a machinegun. The rhyming, too, emphasizes
the uneasy atmosphere of the poem; whereas normal pair- or cross rhyming
creates a sense of completeness and fulfillment, Owen does something quite
different: In every stanza, lines 1+4 and 2+3 end with words that share
consonants, but have different vowels, such as “silent – salient” and “knive us
– nervous.” This uncommon form of rhyming is called pararhyme and leaves the reader with an edgy and incomplete
feeling. Obviously, the purpose of Owen is to leave the reader in in an
insecure, nervous state much like the soldiers in the frozen foxholes. To
achieve this end, the use of a highly unorthodox manner of rhyming forces the reader to rethink his or her perceptions of what poetry – and preferably war –
is.
In
conclusion, “Exposure” reflects Wilfred Owen’s famous words that his subject
was “War, and the Pity of War.” In particular, this poem asks the reader to
pity and understand the hapless soldiers, even in situations where normal
forces of nature nonchalantly become greater enemies than the German war
machine. However, this is neither a sarcastic, snarky remark like Sassoon’s
“Does it matter?” nor a sharp attack on
warmongers as in Owen’s own “Parable of the Old Man and the Young;” in spite of
its thoroughly revised composition, “Exposure” is simply a vivid description of
life for millions of young men during a so-called quiet period without any
battles taking place. Owen does not lash out angrily, but tries to remind the
civilian population that soldiers are to be pitied even when no deaths are
reported in the news of the war, asking them to keep their hearths and hearts
warm and open to the young men far away from home. It is a plea for
understanding that will ring out true as long as mankind continues to wage war
on itself.
[1] Stanza 1, l. 2.
[2] Stanza 6, l. 5.
[3] Stanza 2, l. 4.
[4] Stanza 1, l. 1.
[5] Stanza 2, l. 1.
[6] Stanza 5, l. 1.
[7] Stanza 3, ll. 3-4.
[8] Stanza 2, l. 5.
[9] Stanza 6, l. 1.
[10] Stanza 7, l. 1.
[11] Stanza 7, l. 5.
[12] Stanza 8, l. 1.
[13] Stanza 2, ll. 2-3.
[14] Stanza 4, l. 2.
[15] Stanza 4, l.1.
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