Soldiers in the trenches wait through a freezing night and dawn in which nothing happens, attacked more by the wind and snow than by the enemy, dreaming of home and wondering why they are dying.
How Owen's personified weather, half-rhymes, ellipses and refrain present the cold, waiting and despair of the front line, and how the poem questions faith and the purpose of the war.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'the merciless iced east winds that knive us', 'Worried by silence, sentries whisper', 'But nothing happens', 'Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles', 'What are we doing here?', 'Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army', 'Pale flakes with fingering stealth', 'Is it that we are dying?', 'For love of God seems dying', 'All their eyes are ice'.
Form: eight five-line stanzas, each ending on a short line, four of them the refrain But nothing happens; long, slow lines; half-rhymes such as silent and salient; and a first-person plural voice that speaks for all the men.
Context: Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), an officer in the Manchester Regiment who was treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital in 1917, where he met Siegfried Sassoon; his aim to show the pity of war, against the patriotic verse of poets such as Rupert Brooke; and his death in action a week before the Armistice, before most of his poems were published.
Compares well with: The Charge of the Light Brigade (glory against the misery of war), The Man He Killed (the futility of war), Extract from The Prelude (nature as an overwhelming power) and The Destruction of Sennacherib (death from powers beyond human control).
