Exposure by Wilfred Owen: what it is about, its context, and how Owen uses language, form and structure.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the cluster it compares well with, with similarities and differences.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us', 'But nothing happens', 'Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles', 'What are we doing here?', 'the flickering gunnery rumbles', 'Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces', 'Is it that we are dying?', 'For love of God seems dying', 'All their eyes are ice'.
Form: pararhyme, the refrain 'But nothing happens', ellipses and the half-line at the end of each stanza.
Context: Owen on the Western Front in the winter of 1917, and his death in 1918.
Comparisons with Storm on the Island, the extract from The Prelude and Bayonet Charge.
