Exposure: the war where nothing happens and the men die anyway

Who is the enemy in a war poem? The obvious answer is the soldiers on the other side, with their guns and their attacks. In Wilfred Owen's Exposure, those soldiers never arrive. Nobody charges, nobody is shot in front of you, and men die anyway. The title is the clue: when people die of exposure, it is the cold that kills them. The killer is named in the poem's very first line, hiding in plain sight.

Owen was an officer on the Western Front, the line of trenches across France and Belgium. That one clause is all the background this poem needs, and more than that pulls an answer away from the poem. It opens on a freezing night in a trench. "Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us ... Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent ..." "Low, drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient ... Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous, But nothing happens." The salient is a part of the front line that bulges out towards the enemy. Flares are lights fired into the sky. And notice the first weapon verb in the poem belongs to the wind: it knives them. The second verse keeps them listening in the dark: "Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire, Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles. Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles, Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war. What are we doing here?" The real guns rumble far off, like somebody else's war. That leaves the men with a question, and for now nobody answers it. Later, morning comes: "Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey, But nothing happens." In that line, who attacks: the enemy soldiers, the dawn, or Owen's own men? The dawn. Owen turns the sunrise into soldiers, and in this poem the weather is the real enemy. Here is that dawn verse whole: "The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow ... We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy. Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey, But nothing happens." Dawn usually brings hope. Here it brings poignant misery, a sadness sharp enough to hurt.

Turning the dawn into an army is a move that runs through the whole poem: Owen hands the weapons to the weather. Even the wind on the barbed wire is described as dying men: "Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire, Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles." So nature and the war stop being separate things. The wind sounds like the wounded, and the cold does the wounding. The fourth verse brings real bullets, and then the snow: "Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence. Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow, With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause, and renew, We watch them wandering up and down the wind’s nonchalance, But nothing happens." Those bullets are the only enemy fire near the men in the whole poem. Then the soft, slow snow takes over, on a wind that does not even care. Then there is the refrain, a line that repeats like a chorus. Nothing happens closes four of the eight verses, including the very last line of the poem. Why does that refrain get more frightening each time it comes back? Because the men are a little closer to death each time. Nothing happening is not boredom; it is the killing, carried out slowly by the cold while they wait. In the fifth verse, the cold starts work on their minds. "Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces – We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed, Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed, Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses. – Is it that we are dying?" The snow's fingers feel for their faces. Numbed, the men drift into a dream of summer. That warmth is a warning, because freezing men grow drowsy before they die. In the sixth, their ghosts go home: "Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires, glozed With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there; For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;" "Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors are closed, – We turn back to our dying." At home the fire has burned down to embers, and the mice have the house. Even home is shut to them, so they turn back to the snow. One verse even reaches for a reason to be out there, and it comes back empty: "For love of God seems dying." Here is that seventh verse whole: "Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn; Nor ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit. For God’s invincible spring our love is made afraid; Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born, For love of God seems dying." This answers the second verse's question, "What are we doing here?" They lie out here so the fires at home can keep burning. Not loath means not unwilling: they say they go willingly. Then the last line takes the reason away again, because even the love of God seems to be dying. The last verse brings the night back: "Tonight, this frost will fasten on this mud and us, Shrivelling many hands, puckering foreheads crisp. The burying-party, picks and shovels in shaking grasp, Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice, But nothing happens." The frost takes the mud and the men in one breath, as if they were the same thing. That is the cold, doing the killing. Listen again to the poem's last picture, the dead: "The burying-party, picks and shovels in shaking grasp, Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice," and then the refrain, one final time. All their eyes are ice will not settle on one meaning. It could be the frozen dead, or the numbed men digging their graves, and that is the point: the living and the dead have started to look the same.

So here is who does the killing: no enemy soldier. The refrain is not a complaint about boredom, it is the killing itself, because Owen gives every weapon verb to the wind and the frost. The poem shows men destroyed by a war that never bothers to arrive.

One examiner's report on this poem says: The most successful responses started with a big idea from the poem, such as the horrific nature of trench warfare, and then selected the methods that Owen used to explore this idea. The same report adds: Less successful responses tended to focus mainly on the weather conditions but that still gave them plenty to write about. So the fix is the order you think in. Start from the big idea, what trench warfare does to men, and then choose the weather images that prove it.

Six lines from Exposure are worth carrying in your head, and each one does a different job. The opening line, "Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us", gives the weather the poem's first weapon verb, and no human enemy ever gets one. The refrain, "But nothing happens", comes four times, the last of them closing the poem, so waiting is both the subject and the danger. The gusts on the wire are "Like twitching agonies of men", so the wind is described as dying soldiers. Dawn's "melancholy army" attacks in ranks, but the weather does the killing. "For love of God seems dying" is the one verse that reaches for a reason, and finds nothing. And the burying-party, pausing "over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice", leaves the living and the dead hard to tell apart. In the cluster, Exposure is one of the poems that reaches three strands: the reality of conflict, the power of nature, and what conflict leaves behind.

Let's test the lines with a word taken out of each. "The merciless iced east winds that" do what to us? Knive us. The winds get the weapon verb in the very first line. Now the morning: "Dawn massing in the east her melancholy" what? Army. The dawn's melancholy army attacks in ranks, and the weather is the poem's real enemy. Try the faith line: "For love of God seems" what? Dying. Even the love of God, the reason for being out there, is fading. Back to the snow verse: "Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow". Deadlier: bullets or air? The air. Owen says the bullets are less deadly than the snowy air, the same move again: the weather is the worse weapon. The enemy in Exposure never arrives. The weather does the killing, and Owen ends the poem as he began it, waiting.

Explain why nothing happening frightens more than an attack and you nailed it; press like and Exposure is ticked. Hasn't landed yet, save it, because nobody gets this poem on a first read.

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