In ‘Exposure,’ the details are selected to create an atmosphere and a human attitude – the cold, and the soldiers waiting; “..in the merciless iced east winds that knive us…/Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent…” As well as the grim endurance on the part of the troops, there is a desire for action; a desire which is mocked by the way in which the weather is presented in this poem through a metaphor of war – “Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army…”
Owens’s technique of half rhyme is again cleverly used, to detach from the seriousness of the poem, which carries the crucial message of the poem; the way to survive the war and perhaps the way the soldiers themselves survived was through imagery; the days of grass and un, “sun-dozed” contrasts with the reality of the bitterness and cold the faces them in, “snow-dozed.” Owen recognises that death can be as certain out of battle, fighting the weather, “…winds that knive us..” as in the battle itself. We are not asked to take an interest in something just because it was happening to Wilfred Owen. A point is made through the evocation of the war, about the war itself. Not one death is expressed in Owen’s work, but in order to appreciate the exploitation, many deaths are expressed.
Like Owen, Isaac Rosenberg characteristically uses the first person; his poetry is unexpected, whereby his poems exist through images, but never for them. Rosenberg manipulated events more than other poets in order to speak for the nation on the exploitation of the war itself. ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ is one of Rosenberg’s most famous poems and it explains in most detail the horror of the trenches during the war. Rosenberg was a poet and a soldier of the war, which makes his poetry more significant to study. The context of the time periods and dates when Rosenberg wrote this poem, when it was published, the actual events experienced, where Rosenberg wrote the poem and the importance of his life in connection with the poem and war are all factors that enable Rosenberg to display his feelings and attitudes about the war and its exploitation.
Interpretations vary for this poem and consequently for any war poem, however there are areas that need to be understood in terms of the Great War itself and the time period. The meaning of ‘the rat’ is important throughout this poem and can also be a symbol of one of Rosenberg’s influences in poetry itself. The rat suggests a connection of enemies in the war; the soldiers have seemed to switch places with this creature in the poem. Similar to Owen’s own realisations of the war and recruiting it is almost like it is man’s turn to end life early, to be rid of; “Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew/Your cosmopolitan sympathies./Now you have touched this English hand/You will do the same to a German.”
Arguably Owen’s most famous poem, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est,’ is a fine example of his narrative first-person poems, written through his own eyes and based on his own experiences and views of the war. Using four clear stanzas, the poem uses standard, alternate rhyming lines. A slow, painstaking rhythm is established at the beginning of the poem through Owen's use of heavy, long words and end-stop lines, in order to illustrate just how slow and painstaking the war was. The pace then quickens during the final stanza (a rhythm achieved by the use of lines with fewer syllables and run-on endings), so that it contrasts with Owen's poignant conclusion given in the last four lines, drawing our attention to this particular point, the whole meaning of the poem as far as the poet is concerned; "If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood/Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs/Bitter as the cud."
‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ allows the reader a glimpse into how the war really was, out there at the front. A real action poem, the gas attack shows a common, and thoroughly gory scenario from his experiences, but that which seems very unreal to the reader. It is the fluid, flexible language that really makes Owen's poems stand out, and it is the language alone that allows him to so easily adapt his works to just how he requires them in order to make his intended audience think. Take ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ for example. The haunting adaptation of the soldiers into horrific cripples in the first stanza quickly erupts into the panic and confusion of the gas attack; "Dim through the misty panes and thick green light/As under a green sea, I saw him drowning."
The nameless soldier, may have seemed like just another unlucky colleague to Owen, but to the reader, a truth is uncovered here that was not touched upon before by the British public, and it carries great shock-effect. ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is a poem full of visual objects that Owen describes very graphically, and it is these visual aids that helps the reader look at the poem in a far more intimate, empathetic way. The “thick green light”, the “white eyes”, and the “haunting flares”, just some of the keywords that Owen uses to enable him to create the intense imagery that he achieves in this poem.
In conclusion, after reading war poetry, anyone would understand the severity of being in the trenches during such a fearful, and horrible time; watching friends die and not being able to do anything about it. The soldiers that lay in the trenches during the war were doing so for their country, soldiers dying for those that didn’t even know and it is through this poetry that the reality and exploitation of the war could be felt. This is what the war poets wanted to achieve; they wanted the public, those who felt that the war would be over in a few months, to realise that this was a war of great horror and despair. However, one of the only ways for the public to realise the extent of the war was through poetry and it was through successful poets like Owen and Rosenberg that a first-hand experience of this exploitation was felt, through their own attitudes and feelings of the war itself, whether they were in the trenches or at camp.
