How do I analyse Exposure for GCSE?

What is Exposure about?

Exposure follows a group of soldiers through one freezing night and the dawn after it, on the Western Front in the First World War. Too cold to sleep and too tense to rest, they listen to the wind tugging at the barbed wire and to guns rumbling far away. They are on watch, waiting for something to happen. Four times the poem ends a stanza on the same flat line: "But nothing happens."

Dawn brings no comfort, only grey cloud and more snow. In the second half of the poem the freezing men drift into a half-dream of home, where the fires glow and the mice have the house to themselves, but "on us the doors are closed". They tell themselves they must stay out here so that home can stay safe. The poem ends with a burial party pausing over the frozen faces of men they half recognise, and the refrain one last time.

The title has two meanings. The men are exposed to the weather with nothing to protect them, and the poem exposes a truth about the war that people at home rarely heard.

What is the context of Exposure?

Wilfred Owen (1893 to 1918) was a British officer in the Manchester Regiment. He reached France in December 1916 and spent the bitter winter that followed in and around the front line. His letters home from those weeks describe the freezing conditions that Exposure turns into poetry. In 1917 he was sent home with shell shock, the name then given to the mental trauma caused by combat. At Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who encouraged his writing.

Owen went back to the front in 1918 and was awarded the Military Cross for bravery. He was killed on 4 November 1918, a week before the Armistice ended the fighting. Only a handful of his poems were published in his lifetime. Exposure appeared after his death, and the first full collection of his poems came out in 1920. In a preface he drafted for a planned book, Owen wrote that his subject was "the pity of War", and that "The Poetry is in the pity."

This matters for AO3, the assessment objective about context. Early in the war, many poems and newspapers at home made fighting sound glorious and noble. Owen had seen the reality and wanted readers to feel what ordinary soldiers went through. What makes Exposure striking is that it shows men suffering when there is no fighting at all.

How does Owen present the weather as the enemy in Exposure?

From the first line, the weather is on the attack. The "merciless iced east winds" knife into the soldiers, so the wind is given a weapon and a cruel will of its own. This is personification, giving human qualities to something that is not human. Dawn becomes an enemy too, gathering "her melancholy army" of grey cloud in the east. The human enemy hardly appears. Nature has taken its place.

Sound does a lot of the work. "Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous" is full of sibilance, a repeated "s" sound, which imitates the hiss of the wind and the whispering men. When bullets do fly, they are "Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow". The comparison is shocking: the snow is more dangerous than gunfire. Even the snowflakes "come feeling for our faces", like fingers hunting for a victim.

Owen also shows the men's hopelessness through questions nobody answers. "What are we doing here?" asks what the war is for. "Is it that we are dying?" is asked so calmly that death sounds like drifting off to sleep. By the seventh stanza their faith is fading too: "For love of God seems dying." The cold is killing their bodies, and the waiting is killing their hope.

What do the form and structure of Exposure add?

Exposure has eight stanzas. Each has four long lines and then a short fifth line, and that short line works like a refrain, a line repeated through a poem. Four times it is "But nothing happens." Every stanza builds up detail and then drops flat, which mirrors a night where the tension keeps building and never breaks. The last stanza ends on the refrain as well, so the waiting is never resolved.

The rhyme is unusual. Owen uses pararhyme, a half-rhyme where the consonants match but the vowel changes, as in "silent" and "salient" (a salient is a stretch of front line that juts out towards the enemy). In every stanza the first line pairs with the fourth, and the second with the third. Full rhyme would sound neat and settled. These near misses sound slightly off, like a world knocked out of shape.

The pace is slow. The first three lines of the poem end in ellipses, trailing dots that let each thought fade away. Caesura, a pause in the middle of a line, breaks "We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy" into short, weary pieces. The long lines have no regular metre, or beat, to hurry them along. Because the poem uses "we" and stays mostly in the present tense, the reader waits alongside the soldiers instead of hearing about them afterwards.

Which poems does Exposure compare well with?

Exposure pairs well with poems about the power of nature and with poems about what war does to soldiers. Three strong choices are below. In the exam you quote your second poem from memory, so pick one you know well.

What could an exam question on Exposure ask?

In AQA Paper 2, Section B prints one named poem from the Power and Conflict cluster, and you compare it with one other poem from the cluster, chosen from memory. The question is worth 30 marks, assessed on AO1, AO2 and AO3. There are no marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar in this section.

Exposure could be the printed poem, or the second poem you bring in yourself. Two focuses to practise:

Focus 1: Compare how poets present the power of nature in Exposure and in one other poem from Power and Conflict.

Focus 2: Compare how poets present the suffering of soldiers in Exposure and in one other poem from Power and Conflict.

Here is an original model opening for the first focus, comparing Exposure with Storm on the Island:

Both poets present nature as an enemy that cannot be fought. Owen, who served through the freezing winter of early 1917, personifies the "merciless iced east winds" as attackers, so his soldiers face an assault their rifles cannot answer. Heaney's islanders at least have walls around them, yet they end up afraid of "a huge nothing". Owen's refrain "But nothing happens" works in a similar way, because the emptiness itself is the threat. His soldiers, though, have no walls at all.

Key quotations from Exposure to learn

Six short quotations, each with a line of analysis to learn alongside it.

• "Our brains ache": the opening words make the pain mental as well as physical, and the present tense puts us in the trench with the men.
• "But nothing happens": the refrain, repeated four times, turns waiting into its own kind of suffering.
• "What are we doing here?": a blunt question about the point of the war, which the poem never answers.
• "Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow": the weather is more dangerous than the bullets.
• "the wind's nonchalance": nonchalance means a calm lack of interest, so nature does not even care that the men are suffering.
• "For love of God seems dying": the men's faith is fading along with their bodies.