English GCSE AQA: Comprehensive Analysis of the Power and Conflict Poems

Exposure (1917) - Wilfred Owen

Précis: The Poem is an in-depth view of life in the frosted winter of Southern France, where soldiers on duty would be left exposed to the elements.  

Context: Wilfred Owen was a soldier and officers in World War 1. He died before the end of the war but during his time he saw the full horror of conditions on the front line. He wrote a number of poems about this, published after the war with the help of fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon.

World War One began in 1914 and at first, it was predicted that it would end swiftly. However, as both sides dug trenches across France and Belgium, the opposing armies became locked in a that neither side could break. By the winter of 1917, both sides had sustained massive losses and extreme cold weather made the misery even worse. It was said to be the coldest winter in living memory. The soldiers suffered from and frostbite and many developed trench foot, a crippling disease caused by feet being wet and cold and confined in boots for days on end.

Owen and his fellow soldiers were forced to lie outside in freezing conditions for two days. He wrote: "We were marooned in a frozen desert. There was not a sign of life on the horizon and a thousand signs of death... The marvel is we did not all die of cold."

It was against this background that Owen wrote Exposure.

Owen and a number of other poets of the time used their writing to inform people back in Britain about the horrors of the war and in particular about life on the front line. The picture they painted the scenes of glory portrayed in the British press. Exposure is a particularly hard-hitting example of this.

Owen had joined the army in 1915 but was hospitalised in May 1917 suffering from shell shock (which is known today as PTSD – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). At the hospital, Owen met the already established war poet Siegfried Sassoon who, recognising the younger man's talent, encouraged him to continue writing.

Owen eventually returned to the war but was tragically killed just days before the war ended; he was just 26. He is now regarded as one of Britain's greatest war poets. 

The war itself was often criticised because of a huge loss of life for very little gain. During the Battle of the Somme, over 60,000 British soldiers died in one day, and in all, they only gained 6 miles by the end of the war. Owen's poems were often angry that the soldiers were in muddy dangerous trenches while the generals behind the lines were living in comfort. Owen's poems tried to show the truth of conditions to people back home. He was not against fighting but was angry about the conditions soldiers had to live with in order to do so. 

Themes: The poem itself is based on war and so links to conflict. The poem itself is about the weather and conditions of living in the trenches rather than any fighting. It is more a poem about the conflict between man and nature. This is extremely relevant because man has created machines that can launch explosive shells for miles and destroy the landscape, and yet, nature can still do more harm than any of it.

Having been written about soldiers in a trench, we expect to see a large amount of military language, however, most of this is used to describe and personify the weather as if it were an army attacking them. The poem ends with the fear of tonight and the people who will lose lives and how none of this will change anything. Within the poem, it is the weather that is represented as merciless and triumphant.  

War:  In this poem, he looks at a particular aspect of how death claimed the lives of so many soldiers. The soldiers seem to have little idea of where they are, what they are fighting for and for how long it will be. There is only one certainty and it is that war is something that persists:  "We only know war lasts" 

Weather:  The freezing conditions are seen as being dangerous as the enemy. The soldiers are fighting two battles at once and at one point, bullets are seen as less deadly than the cold. The weather is likened to an army that gathers and assaults the soldiers in the trenches: "Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army / Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey".