On the other hand, ‘Exposure’ completely contrasts the free verse form ‘Poppies’ has, and instead has a rigid and repetitive ABBAC rhyme scheme which not only gives the poem gravitas but also reflects the repetitive nature of the war in the poem. The title ‘Exposure’ itself can be interpreted as a reveal of the true disheartening nature of war to shock contemporary readers back at home who are used to hearing the heroism of war. The pararhymes used in the poem such as ‘knive us’ and ‘nervous’ can also gives the poem a sense of being agitated and on edge, symbolising the soldiers’ tense emotions. The poem starts and ends with the bleak refrain ‘But nothing happens’, giving the poem a cyclical structure, highlighting the futility of war and how even when they are dying en masse - as seen by the use of first person plural ‘we’ - nothing changes.
Although the two poems are follows different structures, both Weir and Owen utilised structure to convey war in their poems. In ‘Poppies’, enjambment and caesura are employed to convey the narrator’s grief at her son leaving, such as in ‘All my words flattened, rolled, turned into felt, / slowly melting.’ In this particular example of enjambment, the sentence not only flows onto the next line but also to a whole new stanza. This break in structure reflects and highlights the mother’s breaking composure, drawing readers’ attention to this change in emotion or thoughts. This sentence is immediately followed by ‘I was brave, as I walked/with you’ The caesura between ‘slowly melting’ and ‘I was brave’ symbolise another change in emotion where the narrator forces herself to pull it together after nearly breaking down so as to not make the departure of her son more difficult. All the enjambments and caesuras used by Weir combine to give ‘Poppies’ a chaotic structure, reflecting the chaotic nature of war on those at home who are plagued with the terrifying thoughts of their loved ones at war. Readers across Europe, especially mothers, who have lost a loved one due to war would have very strong feelings towards this as they are able to relate to the internal sadness and distress felt by the narrator.
Whereas in ‘Exposure’ the structure of the poem is much more ordered and contained; Every stanza follows a pattern of using emotive language in the first four lines to dramatically heighten tension but because they end with an anti-climatic line where ‘nothing happens’, there is never a climax. This connotes how the soldiers during WW1 waited in trenches with a tense energy, ready for an enemy attack yet nothing really ever happens due to stalemate so they live in an unending cycle of terse energy that is never fulfilled. Similar to ‘Poppies’, Owen also uses caesuras in his poem, to emphasise the importance of the connotations that follow the disruption in rhythm, such as in the caesura in ‘Pause over half known faces. / All their eyes are ice’, symbolising that the soldiers are so mentally ruined by the war that they are iced over, that they don’t feel anything anymore.
Both Weir and Owen use semantic fields to convey war in their respective poems. In ‘Poppies’ there in an interesting use of two contrasting semantic fields. The first is the semantic field of war. The title ‘Poppies’ itself is a connotation of war and especially WW1 because it alludes to the poppies worn nowadays to remember or honour those who have died in WW1 and any other war since then. In the sentence ‘spasms of paper red, disrupting a blockade of yellow bias binding around your blazer’ there are words from the lexical set of injury, of violence such as ‘spasms’ and ‘blockade’, however the textiles term ‘yellow bias’ is from a much more idyllic and homely lexical set. This blend of war imagery and domestic imagery conveys how the war has invaded the narrator’s once peaceful and blissful life, that the war has taken her son from her and now the mother is constantly worried about her son suffering or maybe even dying on the violent battlefield, which would resonate with many other maternal readers whose son was killed in WW1 or more recent conflicts.
Similar to ‘Poppies’, Owen chooses to use words from a heavily evident semantic field of war, violence, and suffering. This can be seen for example in stanza two with ‘mad gusts tugging on the wire, / Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.’ Here the wind is personified as a crazed figure tugging on the barbed wires, a defensive measure used in WW1 to protect from attacking troops, and that action reminds the narrator of the ‘agonised’ men caught in the ‘brambles’, about to die. These gruesome terms used would have shocked contemporary audiences as they were used to hearing the glorious aspects of war. Like ‘Poppies’ domestic imagery is used to contrast the reality of war when the soldiers dream of the fires back home which are ‘glozed / With crusted, dark red jewels’, accentuating the wholesomeness and their longing for home, which like in ‘Poppies’ is not fulfilled.
In conclusion, both Weir and Owen convey war in their respective poem. ‘Poppies’ presents the effect of war on those at home, how war can tear a harmonious, domestic family apart whereas ‘Exposure’ presents the gruesome war at the frontline from the perspective of a man who has physically taken part in WW1, ‘exposing’ the shocking truth to contemporary readers.
