• Voices in wartime
“Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

Exposure …
What does the title suggest
??????????

Opening Line:
“
Our brains ache…”
Echoes of Keat’s opening line of “Ode to a
Nightingale”, “My heart aches…”
Why
???????????
-No time for emotion
-Horrors that the romantics had not dreamt of now exist in war

What is the biggest threat to man?
– Weather
– Nature
We hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire / among its brambles
The merciless iced east winds that knive us
Flights of bullets streak the silence.
Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow
Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army attacks once more in ranks…
Write down quotes that suggest nature is the real enemy and explain how it affects the men.

Owen went to the front at the Somme in winter 1916-17. The weather was bitterly cold and took the lives of many men. This is an extract from a letter he wrote to his mother.
“No-man’s land under the snow is like the face of the moon, chaotic, crater ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness…My platoon had no dug-outs but had to lie out in the snow in the deadly wind…
Hideous landscapes, vile noises…everything unnatural, broken, blastered; the distortion of the dead, whose unburied bodies sit outside the dugouts all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth.”

©
IWM
The main British offensive in 1917 was at Ypres against the Passchendaele Ridge. Unusually heavy rain fell. Stretcher bearers, like these Canadians on 14 November, struggled to bring back the wounded. © IWM

British troops at Serre, France, 1917. © IWM

British soldiers (from the Royal Warwickshire Regiment) and German soldiers (from the 134th Saxon Regiment) together.
Photograph taken December 26, 1914 by Second Lieutenant Cyril Drummond. © IWM

first verse
Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knife us...
Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent...
Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient...
Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
But nothing happens.
1.Who do you think is narrating this poem?
2. Where do you think they are? What is happening around them?
3. How are they feeling? How do you know?

• Draw the following table in your jotters and in your groups analyse the first stanza of the poem.
Language feature
The senses are used:
Seeing
Hearing
Feeling
Example/quote
“Dawn massing”
“shivering ranks of gray” (l.14)
“the air that shudders black with snow” (l.17)
“flakes that flock”
(l.18)
Analysis/Evaluation
The colour palette is monochrome: blacks, whites and greys. The effect is bleak and hopeless. The scene moves from an ominous grey dawn, through to swirling snow. The air is
“black with snow” – an image which subverts
(turns upside down) conventional ideas of snow as being ‘pure’. The effect is unsettling and sinister.

• Draw the following table in your jotters and in your groups analyse the first stanza of the poem.
Language feature personification
Example/quote Analysis/Evaluation
“merciless iced east winds that knife us…”
Emphasizes harsh conditions of the wind.
Fighting two enemies – nature is the main one here. It’s lethal. The men feel the wind is piercing.
The word ‘merciless’ shows the wind won’t stop hurting the men.

• Draw the following table in your jotters and in your groups analyse the first stanza of the poem.
Language feature
Reference to ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by
Keats ‘Our hearts ache’
Example/quote Analysis/Evaluation
‘Our Brains Ache’ Owen uses this to emphasize how horrific nature can be and the apocalyptic world he is living in during the war.

• Draw the following table in your jotters and in your groups analyse the first stanza of the poem.
Language feature
Sibilance
Example/quote
“…silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,”
Analysis/Evaluation
Used to emphasize how worries the men are by the silence and how quiet and tense they are being as they anticipate an attack, feel uncomfortable.

• Draw the following table in your jotters and in your groups analyse the first stanza of the poem.
Language feature
Pararhyme (halfrhyme)
Example/quote
Silent and salient
Knife us and nervous
Analysis/Evaluation
This creates a jarring effect and gives an unsettling feeling and this helps to create the ominous anticipation that the men feel.

• Draw the following table in your jotters and in your groups analyse the first stanza of the poem.
Language feature ellipsis
Example/quote
At the end of lines
1, 2, 3
Analysis/Evaluation
To show that the suffering of the men is on going and doesn’t stop. The wind continues to blast them with it’s easterly wind which is the coldest of the winds.

Language feature
Personification
Simile
Rhetorical question
Example/quote Analysis/Evaluation
“mad gusts tugging on the wire”
The wind is very strong and moving the barbed wire violently.
“like twitching agonies of men among its brambles”
He graphically conjures up a horrific image of the men he has seen dying on the barbed wire. ‘brambles’ is used to compare it to the spikes in the shrub and links it to the theme of nature thus exemplifying how unnatural war is.
“What are we doing here?”
The men are wondering why they are not fighting/why they are away from their families. The last line of each stanza is a short line so that it stands out. The men start to question why they are in this

Language feature
Personification
Sibilance and a triple
Example/quote Analysis/Evaluation
“in ranks on shivering ranks of gray.”
The weather is compared to the German army as the clouds are ‘gray’ which means more snow or rain which will be dangerous to them.
“Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army”
The weather as the enemy to the men which is intent on killing them. Usually dawn would bring the hope of a new day but here it just brings more misery and hardship for the soldiers.
“We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.”
To emphasise the pouring rain and the conditions that the men have to put up and they have been at war so long they have forgotten everything else.

Language feature
Sibilance personification
Example/quote Analysis/Evaluation
“Sudden successive…silence.”
“less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow”
Speeds up the pace of the poem to emphasise the bullets coming from nowhere and also helps to create a sinister atmosphere.
The men are more afraid of the weather than the bullets as they can defend themselves against the bullets but can do nothing to stop the snow and rain. The image “black with snow” is unusual and helps to exemplify how mush snow there is. “Shudders” personifies the snow and helps to show it as the enemy.

Language feature
Alliteration
Irony
Example/quote
“Flowing flakes that flock”
Analysis/Evaluation
Almost a pleasant image but the wind is actually blowing the flakes ‘sidelong’ into the men’s faces. It contrasts to the frightening images before of the gun fire but actually this is more deadly.
“the wind’s nonchalance”
The snow is being blown by the wind at the men and it doesn’t care who it kills slowly.

Language feature
Personification
Imagery connotations neologism
Example/quote Analysis/Evaluation
Pale flakes with lingering stealth come feeling for our faces
Helps to show how the weather is not giving up in trying to kill the men and is the enemy.
“cringe in holes”
“stare snow-dazed”
“So we drowse, sundozed”
The word helps to makes us think of the pitiful manner in which the men have to conduct themselves, far from being the ‘heroes’ of war as they are reduced to acting like animals to stay out of the weather.
The men are mesmerised by the snow and cold and confused. Starting to feel the effects of exposure. Maybe they are imagining the sun shining as they drift off.

Language feature
The last line changes caesura
Example/quote
Romantic image which directly links to
Keats.
L.24”Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses”
Analysis/Evaluation
Nature carries on while the men are dying. The blossoms make us think that it is spring, a time of year full of hope that contrasts to the horror that the men are suffering.
“Is it that we are dying”
The men start to realise that they are in trouble and could die. Something is happening.
“Shutters and doors all closed: on us the doors are closed”
The break in the line of poetry is used to clarify the point that the men can not go home until they have won the war.
“We turn back to our dying”
The men have completely given up they return to the limbo state between living and dying.

Language feature
‘His’ in capitals metaphor
Example/quote
“Therefore not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born/For love of God seems dying.”
Analysis/Evaluation
The men realise that their fate is to sacrifice themselves like Christ for the good of others. They are prepared to do this but at the same time they can’t understand how
God can do this to them and so they start to question Him and their own religion.
“Tonight, His frost will fasten on this mud and us,”
The men know that tonight is the night they will die from exposure. ‘His’ in capitals to relate to God who is responsible for this terrible weather.
“All their eyes are ice,”
The men’s eyes are compare to ice to highlight how unemotional they are about burying the corpses as they have done it so many times before. It also links into the environment which is cold

Language feature repetition
Example/quote
“But nothing happens”
Analysis/Evaluation
Owen is being ironic as something terrible has happened – the men have died! Also, they have died a slow and terrible death.
Nothing has happened though in the sense of there being a big battle or anything
‘heroic’ happening to them as was expected when they first went to war. This is far from a ‘heroes’ death’.

Language feature Example/quote Analysis/Evaluation

Language feature Example/quote Analysis/Evaluation

Language feature Example/quote Analysis/Evaluation

• You will be divided into two groups. One will have extract A 6-20 from the poem and the other extract B 21-35. You will need to work together to analyse the poem using the table to take notes as you did for the first stanza.

1. Join up with another pair looking at the same section of the poem. Share your ideas as a group. Discuss examples of the language features you found particularly effective.
2. Now join up with a pair who were looking at a different section of the poem. Take it in turns to describe what is happening in your extract. Share at least one example of a language feature, and say what effect it has on the reader.
Discuss:
• What are the main differences between extracts A and B?
• How does the language change?
3. Share your ideas as a whole class.

Exposure by Wilfred Owen – final verse
To-night, His frost will fasten on this mud and us,
Shrivelling many hands and puckering foreheads crisp.
The burying-party, picks and shovels in their shaking grasp,
Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,
But nothing happens.

Form – how a poem is physically put together
Rhyme - a repetition of similar sounding words occurring at the end of lines in poems or songs.
A rhyme is a tool utilizing repeating patterns that brings rhythm or musicality in poems which differentiate them from prose which is plain.

Metre - a system of describing what we can measure about the audible features of a poem looking at the syllables and stresses on words to create a pattern.
Repetition - is a literary device that repeats the same words or phrases a few times to make an idea clearer

Contrast - to compare in order to show unlikeness or differences. E.g when the men are dreaming fondly of home vs the harsh conditions of outdoors
Sibilance – where the letter ‘s’ or ‘sh’ sound is used to create a hissing sound.
Pararhyme - is a half-rhyme in which there is vowel variation within the same consonant pattern.
http://www.francisgilbert.co.uk/2011/09/my-youtube-videos-which-explain-wilfredowens-exposure-and-spring-offensive /

• http://
• www.francisgilbert.co.uk/2011/09/myyoutube-videos-which-explain-wilfred-owensexposure-and-spring-offensive/

Listen to Ivor Novello’s famous song written in
1914 and compare the mood of the song to
Owen’s poem.

• Tutorial on the poem
• Pathetic fallacy in the poem
• Blockbusters quiz on the poem.

• Streetcar Named Desire
• Tuesday 16 th September 7pm
• £15 per head

Choose a poem in which aspects of structure
(such as verse form, rhyme, metre, repetition, climax, contrast, narrative development …) play a significant role.
Show how the poet uses at least two structural features to enhance your appreciation of the poem as a whole.