Exposure

Exposure by Wilfred Owen describes soldiers in the trenches of the First World War on a freezing winter night. Nothing happens: there is no battle, just endless waiting, while the cold slowly kills them.

Owen was an officer who fought on the Western Front. He wrote about the suffering he saw, not the glory: in the preface to his poems he wrote that his subject was ‘War, and the pity of War’. He was killed in November 1918, a week before the war ended.

Exposure was written in the winter of 1917, after Owen had survived weeks of bitter cold in the trenches.

The poem has eight stanzas of five lines. Each ends with a short line that falls flat, and four end with the same refrain: ‘But nothing happens.’

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.

The ellipses (‘. . .’) slow the lines down, like the dragging hours. The rhymes are half-rhymes (also called pararhymes), such as ‘silent’ and ‘salient’: the sounds almost match but not quite, which leaves the reader uneasy, just as nothing in the soldiers' world is resolved.

Your anthology follows a later edition, so its spelling and punctuation may differ slightly from the 1920 text above.

The real enemy is not the Germans but the weather. Owen describes nature as an attacking army:

• in the first line, the east winds cut into the men like knives, a violent personification;
• dawn gathers ‘her melancholy army’ (stanza 3) and attacks;
• bullets are ‘Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow’ (stanza 4);
• snowflakes come ‘feeling for our faces’ (stanza 5), like a creeping enemy.

The sibilance in ‘Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence’ (stanza 4) sounds like hissing wind. At the end, frost fastens on the men, and the burial party find that ‘All their eyes are ice’ (stanza 8).

Themes: the power of nature over humans; the suffering of soldiers; the pointlessness of war. The question ‘What are we doing here?’ (stanza 2) speaks for every soldier.

Compares well with:

• Storm on the Island: nature as a violent, attacking force.
• Bayonet Charge: a soldier's experience of the First World War, but in a moment of action rather than endless waiting.
• The Charge of the Light Brigade: two very different views of war, one of glory and one of misery.