GCSE-readyExposure by Wilfred Owen: context, form and key methods
Soldiers wait in the trenches through a freezing night. The real enemy is the weather, and the worst thing is that nothing happens.
Context and Owen's purpose
Owen wanted to show the truth of war, not the glory. Here he shows soldiers dying slowly from cold, boredom and despair, which newspapers at home rarely reported.
Form and structure
Owen uses pararhyme (half-rhyme), such as "knive us" and "nervous". The rhymes never quite match, creating unease, just as nothing in the soldiers' world feels right.
The slow, long lines and the circular structure make time drag.
Language and key methods
Sibilance: "Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence" imitates the hiss of bullets, yet the bullets are less deadly than the cold.
The ending is bleak: burial parties find the frozen dead, and "All their eyes are ice". Owen leaves the reader with the waste of young lives.
Compare how the suffering of soldiers is presented in Exposure and The Charge of the Light Brigade.
- Owen shows slow suffering and futility; Tennyson shows a heroic charge.
- Owen's refrain and pararhyme against Tennyson's galloping rhythm and repetition.
- AO3: Owen wrote from experience in 1917; Tennyson, as Poet Laureate, wrote from a newspaper report.
Answer: Both poets show soldiers suffering because of forces beyond their control, but Owen strips away the glory that Tennyson celebrates. In Exposure, the personification of "the merciless iced east winds that knive us" presents nature as a more cruel enemy than the Germans, and the refrain "But nothing happens" stresses the pointless waiting. In contrast, Tennyson's dactylic rhythm and repetition of "Cannon to right of them, / Cannon to left of them" create action and danger, turning death into heroism. This difference reflects context: Owen wrote as an officer who had endured the trenches, while Tennyson wrote as Poet Laureate after reading about Balaclava in a newspaper. Tennyson asks us to honour the soldiers; Owen asks us to see the waste.
First World War, winter 1917; Owen died in 1918. Five-line stanzas; refrain "But nothing happens."; pararhyme; nature personified as the enemy; sibilance of bullets; "All their eyes are ice".
- Context
- The circumstances in which a text was written and set, such as historical events, social attitudes and the writer's life (AO3 in the GCSE, AO4 in the International GCSE).
- Form
- The type and shape of a text: for example sonnet, ballad, free verse, tragedy, comedy, novel or play.
- Refrain
- A line or phrase repeated at intervals through a poem or song.
- Sibilance
- Repetition of 's' and 'sh' sounds, which can sound soft, hissing or sinister.
- Structure
- How a text is organised and develops: its order, shifts, turning points, openings and endings.
- Personification
- Giving human qualities to something non-human.
All GCSE and International GCSE English Literature key terms and definitions →
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