Wilfred Owen Exposure Theme

Wilfred Owen 's, "Exposure", states the fate of the soldiers who perished from the violent war to end all wars, World War One. The themes that are present in this poem are war and disparity. These two themes constantly remind the reader of the ever-present aura of violence. The soldiers are exposed to the horrible conditions of open trench warfare while fighting on the enemy ground. He writes the poem in the first person, and uses the pronouns of "we, us," to symbolize that all of the souls in the battleground felt "the poignant misery" of the war, and describes the bleak dismal that the soldiers all felt collectively in the war. The author uses the burden of "But nothing happens" after most stanzas. However, it is used ironically. War is

He speaks as the idea of bullets breaking the wind, or the burying squad covering dead bodies as something that is insignificant, that it is nothing. The exposure to the war is supposed to leave the men feeling a pressing experience of fear, but instead, they only learn of imminent death and are largely unbothered. Owen reinforces the idea of the disparity, by reminding the audience that casualties in war insignificant, and that death in war is inevitable for the soldiers. A big reason for this is because the men that have lost their faith in God, and a meaningless, trivial life is established in the poem. This is indisputable when the author mentions "For God 's invincible spring our love is made afraid; therefore, not loath, we lie out here; there we born, for the love of God seems dying". The war has tragically demoralized the soldiers, so much that the exposure of violence has stripped them of the love that God presents, resulting in a futile life. The exhaustion, they face in the war disheartens the fighters, which results in the precariousness of the

The "Second Coming" is an allusion based on the New Testament that Christ returned to Earth. The events preceding Jesus coming back will be marked with mankind being doomed to an apocalypse. He uses the "gyres", which would represent the history; which is "turning and turning in the widening gyre", implying that although history will repeat, the ending will be very different than the one suggested by the Christians. The apocalypse he predicted that would occur would have to do with the fact that World War One has just ended. He thought that the European society has broken down from the war, and that future violence would occur. He predicted the rise of political instability, which would ensue as Fascism and Nazism would rise soon after. Yeats describes "things fall[ing] apart, the centre cannot hold" because "anarchy is loosed upon the world", which describes his hypothesis of the breakdown of the society, unleashing disorder and chaos in the countries. He even describes the "falcon [who] cannot hear the falconer", which indicts that the falcon is far away from the falconer, this indicts that control is vanishing, and mankind is one step closer into decimation of the world. Yeats shuts down the "ceremony of innocent", which were the celebrations after the war. he believes that the total chaos will break out as there is civil unrest. There will be a "blood-dimmed tide", water that is