Exposure: The Enemy Is the Weather

Exposure

Wilfred Owen, written during the First World War. Eight stanzas, spoken as we by a group of soldiers. • The men are in a front-line trench through a freezing winter night, awake and waiting. • Guns and bullets are heard, but the attack they dread never comes. • As the cold deepens they drift into dreams of home, then return to the trench. The poem keeps asking what the soldiers are there for. The answer it gives is that the weather, not the enemy, is killing them.

Wind on the wire

Complete the second stanza of Exposure. Watching, we hear the mad _____ tugging on the wire, Like twitching _____ of men among its brambles. Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery _____, Far off, like a dull _____ of some other war. What are we doing here?

Owen at work

Five terms cover most of what Owen does in Exposure. Learn the terms first; the marks come from saying what each one does to the reader, which is what the next step asks.

Name the method in Exposure

The deadlier enemy

This is the start of the fourth stanza. Tap the line where Owen says the weather is more dangerous than the enemy guns.

• Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.
• /
• Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow,
• /
• With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause, and renew,
• /
• We watch them wandering up and down the wind's nonchalance,

Three worlds

Exposure moves between three worlds. Sort each image by the world it belongs to.

• Icy east winds that cut into the men
• Dawn gathering in the east like an army in grey ranks
• Gunfire rumbling somewhere to the north
• Bullets streaking briefly through the silence
• Low fires glowing in a house where mice now play
• Shutters and doors closed against the returning ghosts

Through the night

Put these moments in the order the poem gives them, from the first stanza to the last.

• Aching with cold, the men stay awake while sentries whisper nervously
• Wind tugs at the barbed wire and distant guns rumble
• Bullets streak past, but the falling snow is more deadly
• Snow-dazed, the men drowse and dream of sunlit ditches and blossom
• Their ghosts drift home and find the doors shut against them
• Frost settles, and a burying-party pauses over frozen faces

Nothing happens

Most stanzas end with the same short line, "But nothing happens." What is the strongest reading of it?

• It is bitterly ironic: no battle comes, yet men are freezing to death, so the waiting itself is what kills
• It reassures the reader that the soldiers are safe, because the enemy never attacks
• It shows that the poem is mainly about boredom, and how dull life in the army could be
• It hints that the war is nearly over, so the fighting has stopped

Who was Owen?

Wilfred Owen was a British army officer who fought on the Western Front in the First World War. He drew on what he saw and felt there, including the bitter winter he spent in the front-line trenches early in 1917. Later that year he was treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart hospital in Scotland, where he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who encouraged his writing. Owen went back to the front and was killed in November 1918, one week before the war ended. Most of his poems, Exposure among them, were published only after his death.

Make the context work

Which sentence uses context to sharpen a point about the poem, rather than just adding a fact?

• Because Owen had lived through a winter on the front line himself, the we voice reads as testimony, insisting the public face what the war was really like
• Owen was killed in November 1918, one week before the war ended
• Owen met Siegfried Sassoon at Craiglockhart hospital in 1917
• The First World War lasted from 1914 to 1918

Partners from the cluster

Settle on partners for Exposure before the exam. Here is what happens in two public-domain poems that pair well with it. Storm on the Island and Bayonet Charge are strong partners too.

Exposure and the Charge

Which TWO statements are genuine comparison points between Exposure and The Charge of the Light Brigade?

• Tennyson fills his poem with fast action and glory, whereas Owen shows soldiers suffering while nothing happens
• Tennyson describes the soldiers from outside as they, whereas Owen speaks from inside the trench as we
• Both poems show the enemy army as the main danger the soldiers face
• Both poets fought in the battles they describe
• Both poems use pararhyme to make the reader uneasy

Compare the power of nature

Exam practice. Compare how poets present the power of nature in Exposure and in ONE other poem from Power and Conflict. Write at least 150 words.

• A shared point covering both poems
• A short quotation and a named method from each
• The effect of each method
• How the two attitudes differ
• Context only where it explains