Compare the ways in which Wilfred Owen portrays the extreme situations which the soldiers experience in the poems Exposure and Spring Offensive poems.

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Jagan Annamaraju

Compare the ways in which Wilfred Owen portrays the extreme situations which the soldiers experience in the poems ‘Exposure’ and ‘Spring Offensive’

        Wilfred Owen was a soldier during World War 1. He had first-hand experience in the worst warfare known to man. Exposure and Spring Offensive help to portray these extreme situations. They do this very well due to the fact that Owen had first-hand experience and that his precise use of language techniques help bring out the real circumstances as he saw them.

        

To begin with, the poem ‘Exposure’ is based on the experiences of soldiers in the trenches. We are taken through the day in chronological order, from early morning, to dawn and then to night again. Set in first person, we see and experience the world through the soldiers. This full sensory experience entails the vivid description that helps bring the world to life. One of the first things we are aware of is the extreme cold. The setting is presumably in deep winter as we experience ‘iced east winds’ and ‘sidelong flowing flakes’. Throughout the poem there is mostly quietness, with occasional references to noise, such as when bullets ‘streak the silence’. This dull atmosphere indicated by the silence is again shown when the arrival of dawn is described as being ‘poignant’ and ‘melancholy’, showing the reader how there is a sense of sadness in almost every aspect of the soldiers’ lives.  

        Not only are we given a physical experience of the war, we are also given a psychological experience. From stanza 5 to 7, there is a moment of dreaming, in which we are transported to a sunnier, livelier England, but the part of the dream where the ‘doors close on us’ reiterates the theme of sadness, which appears whether in what they see or what they think.

        Like the repetition found in the poem’s themes, there is also a repetition in the structure of the poem. Exposure consists of regular, 5-lined stanzas that lead us through a day in the trenches, each stanza revealing one of the aspects of the war. It would seem that Owen wanted to portray war as a dull and  boring thing so much so that he has further shown the sense of pointlessness by repeating ‘but nothing happens’ at the end of most stanzas. He has also included thought provoking lines such as ‘is it that we are dying’, to emphasise, via repetition, the growing sense of anticipation.  Yet all these lines ultimately show how, with every passing day, the soldiers are losing faith with the war, and how morale is very low.

Spring Offensive is quite different from Exposure. Firstly, this poem is set in May (‘by the may breeze’), during spring; this is different from exposure which was set in winter. Written in third person, past tense, the reader is looking back at a group of soldiers, initially relaxing when we are soon made aware of the imminent danger, with hints towards the ‘blank sky beyond the ridge’ as we are taken through their ambush on the enemy frontlines.

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We experience a very different atmosphere in Spring Offensive to that in Exposure. During the first half of the poem, it is set in the scene of a grassy meadow, the perfect, bright, spring day. Although there are hints of war and death, that feeling is dampened by the overwhelming sense of life as we hear insects everywhere, with calm, pleasant weather and colourful flowers. Owen’s particular choice in the use of third person is one of the reasons as to why the poem can retain such a calm tone at the start. This is because we can see what ...

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