The Full Text of “Exposure”
1Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us . . .
2Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent . . .
3Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient . . .
4Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
5 But nothing happens.
6Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire,
7Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.
8Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,
9Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war.
10 What are we doing here?
11The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow . . .
12We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.
13Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army
14Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey,
15 But nothing happens.
16Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.
17Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow,
18With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause, and renew,
19We watch them wandering up and down the wind's nonchalance,
20 But nothing happens.
21Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces—
22We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed,
23Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,
24Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses.
25 —Is it that we are dying?
26Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires, glozed
27With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there;
28For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;
29Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors are closed,—
30 We turn back to our dying.
31Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;
32Now ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit.
33For God's invincible spring our love is made afraid;
34Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born,
35 For love of God seems dying.
36Tonight, this frost will fasten on this mud and us,
37Shrivelling many hands, and puckering foreheads crisp.
38The burying-party, picks and shovels in shaking grasp,
39Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,
40 But nothing happens.
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“Exposure” Introduction
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"Exposure" is a poem written by the English poet and soldier Wilfred Owen. Owen wrote "Exposure" in 1918, but it wasn't published until 1920, after Owen's death in World War I. Like most of Owen's poetry, "Exposure" deals with the topic of war. "Exposure" specifically focuses on the sheer monotony of daily life for many soldiers, as well as the harsh conditions they must endure (that is, be "exposed" to) even when not on the battlefield. This suffering is made all the more devastating given the fact that, in the speaker's mind, war seems to accomplish nothing on a larger scale (which is an idea Owen frequently espouses in his work).
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“Exposure” Summary
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Our heads are pounding, and the never-ending wind is so cold that it feels like knives stabbing us. We're exhausted, but we have to stay vigilant because even though we don't hear any enemy fire right now, it's always possible. The flares sent out to illuminate the battlefield just make our job even more confusing. It's so quiet that it's freaking out the soldiers keeping watch, who nervously discuss the possibility of something finally happening. But nothing does.
While on the lookout, we hear the wind frantically rattling through the barbed wire set up as defense around the trenches. It sounds just like the twitching of men dying painful deaths after getting caught in the wire. We can hear constant gun fire coming from the north, but it seems like the sounds belong to some different war than the one we're fighting. I wonder why we're even here?
The sun is coming up, and with it the drudgery of another day in the trenches. We're not sure of anything anymore except for the fact that the fighting goes on and on, rain makes us soaking wet, and there are some very threatening storm clouds in the sky. Dawn is like a general organizing her miserable troops in the east, and her soldiers—wind, rain, and snow—attack us again as we sit in the freezing trenches. But, once again, nothing happens.
Suddenly round after round of bullet whoosh through the air and break up the silence, but they're not as dangerous as the heaving snow storm surrounding us. The wind is so fierce that the snow falls sideways, swirling and building up all around us. We watch the snowflakes as they're carried by the wind, which doesn't seem to care where it goes. But, once again, nothing happens.
The snow flies in our faces, its flakes like fingers slyly reaching out to touch us. We huddle in the trenches and become mesmerized by the cold and snow, to the point that we start to imagine that our trenches are warm, grassy ditches. We imagine that we're drifting off in the warmth of the sun, lying in a field filled with flowers and birds. Does this mean that we're dying?
After a while we begin to imagine that our spirits have gone home. There, they spot fires that have burned out, covered with a layer of glowing coals that look like precious gems. The house is filled with the sound of crickets and happy, scurrying mice, who believe the empty house now belongs to them. The doors and windows are all closed—well, they're all closed to us. So instead we come back to the war, where we're probably going to die.
We don't believe that there are any warm fires left for us, even though the sun still shines brightly down on children and plants. We've lost faith in God's promise of happy, warmer times to come. As such, we're not resentful of our situation; we were born to be on the battlefield and possibly die, because God seems to have abandoned us.
Tonight will be so cold that it will freeze both the ground and our bodies, causing many soldiers' hands to shrivel up and their foreheads to harden and wrinkle. Other soldiers will come to bury those who freeze to death, their hands shaking from fear and cold as they hold their grave-digging tools, stopping occasionally to look at faces that they partially recognize. The dead men's eyes have frozen solid, but, once again, nothing happens.
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“Exposure” Themes
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The Monotony and Meaninglessness of War
Owen's "Exposure" is a poem about war, yet it focuses very little on actual fighting. Instead, its speaker zooms in on the physical and psychological suffering of soldiers huddled in freezing, muddy trenches (like those used during WWI, in which Owen himself served). In this way, the poem exposes both the trauma and sheer monotony of warfare. What's more, the poem presents these struggles as ultimately meaningless; as days and night merge into each other, the speaker repeatedly insists that "nothing happens"—implicitly criticizing war for its futility and unnecessary suffering.
The speaker presents the day-to-day reality of war as at once boring, stressful, and deeply draining; there is no glory or heroism to be found in these trenches. The soldiers must remain vigilant throughout the night, so much so that their "brains ache" from watching for any potential dangers. They are "wearied" and "confuse[d]" but have no way to alleviate their struggles.
In addition to this mental turmoil, the soldiers undergo physical strain as they "cringe in holes"—that is, trenches—to protect themselves as best they can from the freezing air that is more "deadly" than bullets. The speaker's description of the sentries being "worried by silence" seems to imply that silence indicates another night of inaction, sitting around and dying from the cold instead of making charges against the enemy. The speaker also calls them both "nervous" and "curious," with the second word implying that the sentries are almost eager for real combat. "But nothing happens"—they are denied that chance.
Four of the stanzas end with that same line: "But nothing happens." The repetition of this refrain emphasizes that war often involves just sitting around and waiting for days on end. War requires constant vigilance, yet it is a vigilance with no outcome, no payoff. This fact, the poem suggests, is part of what makes war so traumatic; as the soldiers wait around, they "only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy." Their minds are filled with a constant sense of dread and sorrow, interrupted occasionally by "Sudden successive streaks of bullets"—a reminder that should they actually be thrust into action, death is always on the horizon. The speaker depicts a dull and dreadful landscape of war that constantly weighs on the soldiers' minds. The terrible conditions, exacerbated by the monotony of the war, create a horrifying image of what it was like for soldiers on the front line.
The speaker's constant assertion that "nothing happens" refers to the frustrating monotony of the war, but it also gestures more broadly to the overall meaninglessness of the war. At one point in the poem, the soldiers ask, "What are we doing here?" The question refers to their immediate conditions: stuck in a trench, dying from exposure in the bitter cold, with no enemy to fight. But the question might also refer to the situation of World War I more generally, in which the actual reasons for the entire war were opaque and hard to understand. In both the specific scene described in the poem and in the entire war itself, there seems to be no reason for the soldiers' suffering. That this rhetorical question is never answered in the poem suggests that there is no answer—there isn't a true purpose for the soldiers to be there.
The poem ends with one final repetition of the line, "But nothing happens," which implies that the deaths of the soldiers described in the final stanza—deaths from the cold, not from battle—are in fact meaningless. The fighting and suffering aren't changing or accomplishing anything. By portraying war as pointless, in which men can and do die just as easily from exposure as from battle, the poem condemns war as futile and refutes any attempt to ascribe to war any kind of glory or heroism.
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Man vs. Nature
The primary enemy the soldiers face is not an opposing army but rather the forces of nature. Huddled in icy trenches, the men face extreme cold and suffer from frostbite and hallucinations, with many eventually dying from their exposure. The conditions are harsh, with "merciless iced winds" constantly battering the soldiers as snowflakes "come feeling for our faces." The poem personifies the forces of nature as an actively hostile force that attacks the soldiers, and presents nature as a more pressing threat than any human enemy.
The winter landscape of war is presented as dangerous and hostile. The winds on the battlefield "knive" the soldiers, and the sounds the blowing winds make remind the speaker of the "twitching agonies" of men dying on the barbed wire. Wind also brings the snow, which is so plentiful that the air "shudders black" with it. The snow falls on the soldiers and fills their ditches, freezing them and creating even more slush that they must sit in or else risk being hit by the bullets that occasionally fly past. The bullets themselves are described as being "less deadly" than the freezing air.
The speaker illustrates the effects of these dangerous conditions in describing the eventual deaths of the soldiers, as the ice is "Shrivelling many hands, puckering foreheads crisp," and turning eyes to ice. The image of human features shriveling and puckering is so specific and brutal that it forces the reader, at least to an extent, into an impossible-to-romanticize understanding of the soldiers' experiences of exposure.
Not only is nature hostile, it's actively personified as the soldiers' more immediate enemy. Nature takes on an actively combative role in the poem as winds "knive" the soldiers and snowflakes stealthily "come feeling for our faces." Such actions are notably human and convey the idea that the soldiers are indeed under attack from nature. In fact, dawn itself is described as the leader of an army "massing in the east." Though dawn might typically indicate the hope of a new day, for the soldiers it only means another hard day they must attempt to survive under the assault of the wind, snow, and ice. Additionally, the forces of nature are even given emotions; for example, the wind has "nonchalance." Nature is thus both cruel and uncaring in its assault, utterly unconcerned with the suffering it causes.
The power and hostility of nature seem to make the actual human war seem smaller and less important. But it is also possible to read the power of nature as a natural result of the human war, thus making the war in general all the more terrible. Though nature was not the enemy these soldiers enlisted to fight, it takes precedence as the primary enemy once battle begins. The active battles, described by the "flickering gunnery" in the north, only reminds the soldiers of a "dull rumour of some other war." The ware they are forced to primarily concern themselves with is that with nature.
And this is a war the soldiers are undoubtedly losing, as made clear both by their eventual deaths at the end of the poem and by their sense, in the second to last stanza, that the “love of God seems dying.” The soldiers, beset by the elements, imagine the love of God itself flickering out. Nature not only kills the men, it also destroys their faith.
Yet while the soldiers depicted in the poem are more threatened by the freezing wind that by bullets, it's worth noting that it is only because of the war that the soldiers are exposed to bitter nature without the normal protections of civilization: shelter, heat, food, warm clothing, and so on. The way that the war exposes the soldiers to the fury of winter emphasizes the futility, meaninglessness, and dehumanizing brutality of the war. The men are given no chance of glory and instead are reduced to an animal-like state, forced to endure the wrath of nature that civilization was supposed to have tamed, and which they cannot survive.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Exposure”
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Lines 1-5
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 speaker begins the poem with a description of the soldiers' mental state and physical environment. Sitting in frigid trenches during World War I, the soldiers are mentally and physically exhausted. Their "brains ache" from the constant vigilance required of them in case of attack, and they must stay awake in the cold, even though "the night is silent." In fact, it is that silence itself that is so worrying, because the soldiers have no way of knowing where the next attack will come from, or when it will happen. Attempts to light up the battleground with "Low drooping flares" only serve to make the landscape more confusing.
What's more, nature itself seems to be working against the soldiers. The wind is personified as being without mercy, metaphorically stabbing the soldiers with its chill. This is the first indication that nature might be just as dangerous to the soldiers as any enemy army. Indeed, the "exposure" of the poem's title refers, at least in part, to the risk the soldiers face by being literally stuck out in the cold.
These lines also capture the strange duality of emotions the soldiers feel in this situation. They are both "curious" and "nervous"—likely curious because they've been doing nothing but wait in the freezing night air for hours, and nervous because, if something does eventually happen, it's probably going to involve immediate danger. The alliteration of the /w/ sound across the stanza further reflects the exhausting tension that the soldiers feel: they are at once "Wearied," "awake," "Worried," and "whisper[ing]."
Also note the hissing sibilance in lines 1 and 4: "merciless iced east winds that knive us" and "silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous." The proliferation of /s/ sounds lends these lines a hushed and menacing quality that adds to the stanza's sense of weary anticipation.
Despite all this tension and vigilance however, "nothing happens." The speaker closes the stanza with the first instance of a refrain that he will repeat throughout the poem. The implication of this refrain extends beyond this specific wartime scene: by the end of the poem, it'll be clear that this phrase—"But nothing happens"—could just as well refer to the entirety of war itself. In other words, war is futile and meaningless; all this suffering changes nothing.
Also present in these lines is Owen's characteristic use of slant rhyme, seen between the word pairs "knive us"/"nervous" and "silent"/"salient." It's also as if the speaker is simply too weary to make his rhymes full and perfect. The poem almost rhymes but doesn't quite get there, adding to its sense of disorientation and unease.
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Lines 6-7
Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire,
Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.
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Lines 8-10
Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,
Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war.
What are we doing here? -
Lines 11-15
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. -
Lines 16-17
Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.
Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow, -
Lines 18-20
With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause, and renew,
We watch them wandering up and down the wind's nonchalance,
But nothing happens. -
Lines 21-25
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? -
Lines 26-30
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. -
Lines 31-35
Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;
Now 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. -
Lines 36-40
Tonight, this frost will fasten on this mud and us,
Shrivelling many hands, and 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.
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“Exposure” Symbols
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Dawn
Dawn is traditionally a symbol of hope in literature. It usually suggests that life will start again and flourish with the beginning of every new day. However, in "Exposure," dawn works quite differently: it marks the start of yet another day of suffering that the soldiers must endure. Indeed, the speaker first describes dawn as being accompanied by "poignant misery." Dawn thus evokes the relentless agony of war, and it also suggests how the natural world keeps moving along despite human conflicts. The soldiers' fighting has no effect on the dawn, which will come each morning regardless of what people do or how they suffer. The speaker later personifies dawn as the leader of a dangerous army of wind and rain, transforming it from a coldly indifferent element of nature to an actively malevolent force. Ultimately, then, dawn represents both the power and cruelty of nature, which becomes the soldiers' true enemy throughout the poem.
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“Exposure” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Sibilance
The poem's frequent sibilance adds to its tense and disturbing atmosphere. It is often linked to descriptions of the cold and wind. For instance, take the first line: "merciless iced east winds that knive us." The intensity of /s/ sounds evokes the sound of the winds hissing by the soldiers.
In line 4, the poem uses sibilance to create a sense of hushed tension: "silence, sentries whisper, curious nervous." Here, sibilance reflects the sound of whispering voices and heightens the feeling of anticipation that the soldiers feel.
Another striking moment of sibilance comes in line 16: "Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence." As with the poem's first line, the intensity of /s/ sounds here mirrors the whooshing sound of the bullets "streaking" through the night air.
Throughout the poem relies not only on /s/ sounds, but also /sh/ and /z/ sounds—which, in many definitions, are also considered sibilant. Take lines 23-34, where the combination of /s/ and /z/ sounds reflect the lolling, dreamy quality of the line as the soldiers drift in and out of consciousness:
and stare, snow-dazed,
Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,Overall, the poem's intense sibilance makes it feel as if the snow and wind are swirling around the lines themselves. For the reader these sounds are inescapable, just as the weather they often describe is inescapable for the soldiers.
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Simile
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End-Stopped Line
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Enjambment
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Caesura
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Personification
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Refrain
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Consonance
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“Exposure” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Flares
- Salient
- Sentries
- Wire
- Brambles
- Gunnery
- Poignant
- Ranks of grey
- Nonchalance
- Fingering
- Holes
- Sun-dozed
- Glozed
- Invincible
- Loath
- Puckering
- Burying-party
Flares-
Devices used to send distress signals through a bright burst of light.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Exposure”
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Form
This poem doesn't fit into any traditional form. It has eight stanzas, each with five lines. This would technically make these stanzas quintains, but the poem actually reads more like eight quatrains with final lines tacked on. The first four lines of each stanza share similar rhyme sounds and describe the horrors of war; the fifth line in each stanza then either repeats the poem's refrain or makes some reference to "dying." This fifth line attempts to put everything that has come before in perspective and implies that none of this suffering or death changes anything.
Because each stanza is structured in the same way, the poem feels quite ordered and cohesive. The speaker follows a clear structure throughout, which seems fitting given the military setting of the poem and Owen's own military background.
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Meter
There is no consistent meter in "Exposure." Generally, all of the lines have between 12 and 15 syllables, except for the last line of each stanza, which has between 5 and 7 syllables. The lack of consistent meter gives the poem a feeling of uncertainty and instability. This uncertainty mirrors the feelings experienced by the soldiers on the front lines: the soldiers are constantly on edge as they wait for any action. And this constant, vigilant waiting takes both a physical and mental toll, making their "brains ache."
This tension is momentarily broken by the last line of each stanza, which is notably shorter than the other lines in the poem. The shorter lines stand out, even more so through their repetition, and evoke the stagnant, depressing reality of the war for these soldiers.
Though there is no consistent meter in the poem, there are some interesting rhythmical moments. In the very first line, for example, "brains ache" creates two stresses in a row, subtly evoking the sense of a pounding headache. Also metrically evocative is line 8, with its multiple dactyls (metrical feet consisting of a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables). The DUM da da rhythm of "Northward, in | cessantly" is echoed exactly by "flickering | gunnery." This emphatic repetition makes the line itself feel incessant.
Meanwhile, the final line and a half of the poem consists entirely of trochees (stressed-unstressed) if read without the line break:
All their eyes are ice, But nothing happens.
This final, metrical regularity is notable after so much inconsistency. It's as if the final half of line 39 melds into line 40—the soldiers' grisly deaths merging with the poem's hopeless refrain. This underscores the poem's broader thematic message: that all this suffering and death is ultimately meaningless.
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Rhyme Scheme
In contrast to its inconsistent meter, "Exposure" has a relatively consistent rhyme scheme. Within each stanza, the first four lines are end-rhymed in an ABBAC pattern.
With the exception of the sixth stanza, all of Owen's rhymes in this poem are either slant rhymes, which is typical of Owen's poetry. He uses words with the same beginning and ending consonant sounds but different vowel sounds in between. For example: knive us/nervous, silent/salient, wire/war, etc. This technique adds to the poem's jarring, uncomfortable feel; lines almost rhyme, but not quite. Furthermore, it parallels the disconnect that soldiers felt from the declared motivations for the war. The soldiers in this poem experience a very different war from what was described to the general public in England at the time.
When Owen does use perfect rhyme once though, in the sixth stanza when he rhymes "glozed" and "closed" (and something called rich rhyme with "there" and "theirs"). Importantly, this is the stanza in which the soldiers dream of home. The perfect rhyme sounds create a subtle sense of security after so much slant rhyme, much like imagining a warm fire and being home might momentarily comfort the soldiers. At the same time, this comfort proves illusory as the soldiers realize the world has abandoned them and turn back to the horrors of the present. In a way, then, the perfect rhyme almost mocks the soldiers—it evokes the comfort of home in the same line in which it says the soldiers are locked out of that comfort, that its "doors are closed" to them.
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“Exposure” Speaker
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The speaker of this poem is a soldier stationed with a group of men in the trenches during the winter. He is clearly disillusioned with war, finding it tedious and meaningless. The speaker wants to "expose" the harsh conditions of warfare, and to challenge the view that such suffering is necessary in the name of victory.
Though the speaker is just one soldier, he often speaks in the first person plural, using pronouns like "we" and "our" to indicate that he represents a larger group of people. In essence, he is speaking for all soldiers as he describes their situation on the front lines of World War I.
Wilfred Owen was an English soldier who fought and died in World War I. Owen was also very critical of the war and its impact on soldiers, which he experienced first-hand. Based on these facts, it is possible to read the speaker and Owen as being very similar, if not the same person.
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“Exposure” Setting
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Though the exact setting of this poem isn't explicitly stated, it likely takes place during World War I—perhaps even more specifically during the winter of 1917 in France. This assumption can be made based on the fact that Owen himself was deployed to the front lines of France in January 1917 and often drew from his own experiences when writing his poetry. The poem also mentions "flares" and barbed "wire." These were military tools commonly used in World War I, as were trenches—described by the speaker as "holes."
In any case, it's clear that this wartime world is dreary, muddy, and freezing cold. It's snowy and windy, and the soldiers do not have adequate protection from the "merciless" natural elements. Though soldiers can hear gunfire in the distance, death from "exposure" appears more likely than death in battle.
Though the physical location of the soldiers does not change over the duration of the poem, there is a slight change of setting when the soldiers imagine the warm fires at home. There, the speaker describes a field of flowers and birds warmed by the sun and a house illuminated and full of life.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Exposure”
Literary Context
Wilfred Owen wrote "Exposure" in 1918. He wrote the majority of his poems (including two of most famous works—"Dulce et Decorum Est" and "Anthem for Doomed Youth") between August 1917 and September 1918, while he was hospitalized in a military hospital in Edinburgh. There, he befriended fellow war poet Siegfried Sassoon, who greatly influenced the developing style of Owen's poetry.
Most of Owen's poems share similar thematic and stylistic characteristics. Owen wrote primarily about war, especially about the gruesome, brutal parts of it that earlier war poets like Rupert Brooke tended to overlook. In this way, Owen broke from the tradition of war poetry that presented war as a form of patriotic glory and heroism.
"Exposure" also shares many stylistic traits with Owen's other poems, especially in its use of slant rhyme. He broke with many traditional forms of poetry in his work, as evidenced, for instance, by his frequently inconsistent use of meter. This break from tradition is consistent with the larger developments of the Modernist literary movement, which expressed disillusionment with the literary and social establishment by experimenting with new artistic forms.
Historical Context
By 1917 most of mainland Europe was involved in World War I, the largest and deadliest war the world had ever seen at the time. Trench warfare was a major part of WWI military tactics, which Owen references here by referring to soldiers cringing in "holes." The space between opposing armies' trenches—so-called "No Man's Land"—was filled with barbed wire. Poor sanitary conditions in the trenches contributed to the spread of disease, and exposure during winter months was a common killer.
WWI is known not only for its immense number of casualties, also for its psychological effects on those who survived. The term "shell-shock" emerged from the war, in reference to soldiers suffering with what would now be termed PTSD. Owen himself was hospitalized in Edinburgh to treat his "shell-shock." Owen and many others also strongly criticized the war for what they saw as unnecessary loss of life. Owen wrote many of his poems to convey the horrors of war to civilians who had no way of visualizing what war really looked like.
After his hospitalization in Edinburgh, Owen returned to the front lines of the war in the fall of 1918 and died on November 4, 1918, one week before the armistice declaring the end of the war was signed.
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More “Exposure” Resources
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External Resources
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Siegfried Sassoon's Influence — Read a history of Owen's relationship with Siegfried Sassoon, who influenced the development of Owen's poetry while they were both patients at Craiglockhart, a military hospital in Edinburgh.
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Listen to "Exposure" Out Loud — A reading of the entire poem by actor Rupert Mason.
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How World War I Changed Literature — A timeline of how literature changed during and as a result of World War I.
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Biography of Wilfred Owen — Read a full biography of Wilfred Owen's life from the Poetry Foundation.
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A Soldier's Experience — Read what life was like on the front lines for a soldier in World War I.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Wilfred Owen
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