Spring Offensive & Exposure Comparing

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Wilfred Owen Practice CA Comparing Owen’s presentation of war in Exposure and in Spring Offensive Wilfred Owen was a poet in the First World War, who’s work at his time was very unappreciated, however now is one of the most famous war poets of all time, if not the most famous. Owen’s poems reflected very much on the true nature of war and focused on dehumanising it and displaying its gruesome brutality; we see some of his work has similar wider intentions and meaning when read between the lines. A first instance where we can notice a similarity between Owen’s poems, ‘Exposure’ and ‘Spring offensive’, is when we look at Owen’s presentation of the aspect of time in war, and how it was not all over by Christmas as promised, rather timeless in its own horrifying way. The way we can see these two connect is firstly in ‘Exposure’ when we can see Owen’s repetition of the phrase, “But nothing happens” and in ‘Spring Offensive’ when Owen reveals the boredom and anxiety of war as the soldiers, “hour after hour they ponder the warm fields”. What ‘Spring Offensive’ tells us is that, when the soldiers were back in their home country, they were told that it would all be easy and over very quickly, they would be heroes. This is not the case as Owen shows us. In this poem we learn that there was a lot of sad waiting around, some waiting for their inevitable death and others depressed over losses of friends, showing that their was time to reflect on the war as Owen did. Also the use of the phrase, “warm fields” is very much contrasting to that of the coldness of war and its own inner brutality. This links with Exposure as we learn that the coldness of the war even effects those in charge, the officers, on the same side as the soldiers Owen was describing, were sending them to their own death to no avail, causing the question to be asked, “what are we doing here?” The repetition of
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