AQA Power and Conflict: Understanding 'Exposure'

This poem describes, brutally and in detail, the suffering experienced by soldiers on the western front in WW1. Although a great deal of imagery relates to the bitter weather that the men experienced, the 'exposure' of the title is not merely the exposure to cold that the soldiers suffer, but an exposure of the mind--the poem describes how the endless waiting and watching breaks down men mentally as well as physically, so that their life degenerates into a series of unanswered questions and bleak statements. 

The First World War has been called a war of ‘passive suffering’ and Owen certainly focuses here on the torments, not of battle, but of awaiting battle. The experience of waiting for action, confined in the trenches, was for many soldiers a profoundly unnerving experience, and one which created immense stress. In Pat Barker's Regeneration, a fictionalised version of real events during WW1 which features Wilfred Owen, this is described very well when a perceptive psychiatrist, Dr Rivers, reflects on the ways in which men are stressed and traumatised by the experience of this kind of passivity:

Mobilization. The Great Adventure. They’d been mobilised into holes in the ground so constricted they could hardly move. And the Great Adventure – the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they’d devoured as boys – consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that had promised so much in the way of ‘manly’ activity had actually delivered ‘feminine’ passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known. No wonder they broke down. (Regeneration, Chapter 9, pp. 107-108)

Siegfried Sassoon

Dr Rivers was the psychiatrist who treated Owen, who himself suffered from neurasthenia, or 'shell-shock', and had been sent to Craiglockhart military hospital to recover from this. It was in this situation that he met Siegfried Sassoon, who was to be one of the strongest poetic influences on him (and vice-versa). Sassoon had been sent to Craiglockhart in response not to an illness, but to his defiant statement 'A Soldier's Declaration', in which he protested about the way in which the government were waging the war, and refused to return to active service as an act of protest. Sassoon (known as 'mad Jack' for his almost suicidal exploits of bravery) was a decorated hero who had been given the Military Cross and it was an acute embarrassment to the government to have him criticising the war. The declaration was read out in the House of Commons by a sympathetic MP, and so could not be quashed easily. As a result, rather than being court-martialled, he was declared unfit for duty, and suffering from 'shell shock', and sent to Craiglockhart to be 'cured'. Sassoon's radical views encouraged Owen to write directly about his experiences of war, and 'Exposure' was one of the poems that resulted from this new openness in Owen's work. It references the unusually cold winter of 1916/17, which had produced great misery for the men on the Western Front (for some detailed contemporary descriptions of the weather and its effects, see here).

John Keats

‘Exposure’ starts with a reference to one of Owen’s favourite poems: ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by Keats: ‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk’. Of course the heartache and the numbness of which Keats complains is that of a relaxed melancholia which may seem very different to Owen’s bitter description of the hardships of the trenches, but in many ways the poem can be seen as Owen’s response to ‘Ode to a Nightingale’; there are more similarities than may at first appear. Keats, like Owen, is contemplating death, but unlike Owen he is ‘half in love with easeful death’, believing that it is possible ‘to cease upon the midnight, with no pain’. Like 'Ode to a Nightingale', 'Exposure' is couched in the first person, but unusually, this is in the plural: 'Our brains ache, in the merciless East winds that knife us... / Wearied we keep awake' and this immediately draws in the reader to the poem, as though we are sharing directly in the experience described. The use of the plural also gives the sense that this is not a solitary soldier's complaint, but an ongoing feeling of misery common to many men. Owen here seems to become the representative voice of the ordinary soldier. Try replacing the plurals with the singular to see the strength of the difference: 'My brain aches, in the merciless east winds that knife me... / Wearied I keep awake'.


The bitter cold lures the soldiers into hypothermia. When people experience severe cold, they often fall into a dream-like confused mental state in which they believe that they are warm. Mountaineers on Everest have died in this state, throwing off all their clothes in what is called 'paradoxical undressing' as they believe that they are actually too hot. Owen's soldiers dream that they are actually in a different place, a summer day, where they are 'sun-dozed' listening to birds and 'litterered with blossoms'. The lyrical imagery is brutally stopped by the rhetorical question at the end of stanza five: 'Is it that we are dying?' 
In their state of hypothermia, the soldiers experience a brief, ecstatic vision of home. Not only are they experiencing the blossom, birdsong and grass of Rupert Brooke's 'English Heaven', they imagine themselves seeing their own homes, with their household fires banked at night while the 'innocent mice rejoice' in the quiet night (a striking contrast to the 'nervous' sentries of the first stanza). However, the 'ghosts' of the soldiers cannot get home; perhaps because they are ghosts, 'on us the doors are closed'. The houses are sealed against night-time intrusion and the lonely soldiers cannot enter. Bleakly, Owen announces 'we turn back to our dying'. However, if his soldiers ‘turn back to our dying’ it is not because, like Keats, they are 'half in love' with death, but because they believe that only through sacrifice can life be preserved.  




The poem is written in a form which seems to enact the long waiting which it describes. The metre is irregular, with a a loose five-line stanza half-rhymed ABBA and then concluded by a shorter fifth line which does not rhyme, though there is some echoing and repetition of this line throughout the poem. For four stanzas, including the first and the last, this final line is ‘But nothing happens’. Two stanzas conclude with questions: ‘What are we doing here?’ and ‘Is it that we are dying?’, and two repeat the idea of dying with ‘we turn back to our dying’ and ‘For love of God seems dying’. The  form of the poem is unusual, and the length of the lines seems excessive to those used to the most common metres of English poetry. Generally, the longest line you will have come across in poetry is iambic pentameter, consisting of five stresses and ten syllables in each line (the longer alexandrine, with six and twelve, is relatively rare). Owen's line here outdoes both pentameter and alexandrine. The longer lines range from twelve to fifteen syllables, but the first stanza establishes a general pattern of three long lines of thirteen syllables and irregular stresses, followed by a short, five-syllable line. At times the final line is longer or shorter by a syllable or two, but the pattern set in the first stanza is generally kept to. The effect of this form is very striking. The lack of a firm metrical foot accentuates the sense of dissolution spoken of in the poem itself, and suggests vagueness, confusion, uncertainty and a sense of unending stasis. The extra syllables in the lines are often due to extra description, for instance, the winds are not simply 'merciless' they are 'merciless iced east winds', and this layering of description also accentuates the sense of endurance through misery.


The semantic field of the poem is interesting. There are a large number of words which relate to mental distress or exhaustion: 'brains ache... wearies... awake... confuse... worried... nervous... twitching' and these are reinforced by the nature of the activity attributed to the soldiers. The verbs in each stanza describe what they are doing in passive, neutral terms which emphasise their lack of aggression: 'we keep awake...we hear...we only know...we watch them...we cringe...' and these are contrasted with and  juxtaposed with active verbs as Owen describes the effects of the winter on the soldiers in the trenches in a series of vivid personfications: winds ‘knife us’, the ‘mad gusts tugging on the wire’; dawn ‘attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey’, the snowflakes ‘come feeling for our faces’; the frost ‘will fasten on…us, shrivelling…puckering’. The overall effect is to make the weather seem more alive and active and certain than the men who experience it.


The poem presents a series of sharp contrasts, starting with the initial contrast between the passive soldiers and the active winds, and reinforced with the almost-paradoxical 'we keep awake because the night is silent'. Here, the expected normality of ordinary life (where it is noise that keeps you awake not silence) is replaced by the reality of war, which is that silence offers a potential threat--as the penultimate line of the first stanza explains: 'worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous'. Similarly, dawn, traditionally a symbol of hope, becomes only a time of 'poignant misery', with a 'melancholy army' of clouds to attack the soldiers with cold. The frequent use of ellipsis (...) at the end of lines implies that the statements are incomplete, and that there is more to be said. It is an unusual form of punctuation, and implies that the speaker's voice is falling away through weakness or weariness. It contrasts with the certainty of the shorter final line in each stanza, the bleak 'but nothing happens' repeated most often shutting off all possibility of change or resolution. 

Owen’s response to Keats develops into a description of a numbness that is nothing to do with sedation and all to do with cold. Even the bullets in stanza five, although they touch the silence are seen as 'less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow'. The personification of the weather is striking: not only are the clouds an 'army' (the 'shivering ranks of grey', unusually, not the soldiers, but the snow that attacks them) but the 'fingering stealth' of the snowflakes suggests they are impossible to avoid. Unlike Keats, whose contemplation of nature in the form of the nightingale leads him back towards life again, Owen sees nature as a personified malicious force which ‘attacks’ in a way that the formal enemy almost never does. The single mention of bullets describes them as though they were birds, in ‘sudden successive flights’, and also as ‘less deadly than the air’. In the poem, no-one dies through being shot; they die of cold.


Stanzas six and seven of the poem draws upon the popular song 'Keep the Home Fires Burning' with its refrain 'keep the home fires burning / While your hearts are yearning / Though your lads are far away they dream of home'. The song was written early in the war, and Owen would have known it, and known the potency of the image. The dream here has been made real, as the men yearn to come home, and cannot, because they have their own role in keeping those fires burning. They draw away and 'turn back to our dying. / Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn'. The passionate statement that follows is reminiscent of the contrast in 'Futility' between the 'kind old sun' of home and the reality of the bitter weather on the front line (for an analysis of 'Futility' see my previous blog). The 'invincible spring' of God inspires the soldiers, but 'love of God seems dying'. This phrase can be taken two ways: either 1) love of God is falling away, people are losing their faith or 2) love of God is going to have to be expressed through dying for others. The delicate tension between the two meanings seems deliberate; as in 'Futility' Owen is suggesting that the situation of the Western Front is going to bring no easy answers.   


Following the courageous assertion that the men are 'not loath' to face the weather and the suffering, knowing that by doing so that they are protecting their loved ones, Owen's final stanza is a bleak and almost surprising reprise of the situation at the start of the poem. Despite the vision of home, the brief respite that it has given, symbolised by the change of form and the shift in the refrain, there has been no real change. Even the burying-party's recognition of those who die of cold suggests that they have been made cold at heart: 'all their eyes are ice' works as a description both of the dead, frozen, and those who look at them, seeing them only as 'half-known'. The final, bleak 'But nothing happens' makes the poem seem almost circular. After the activity of the bullets, the dream of home, the return, the soldiers are still condemned to the kind of waiting that will turn them into frozen corpses, trapped in the kind of passivity that seems unending. Paradoxically, the only action that they will be offered is that of war; the suggestion here is that even that would be preferable to the kinds of reflection that exposure to the weather brings.