The Ways in which Wilfred Owen Portrays the Extreme Situations - Essay Example

Exposure focuses more on the dark part of becoming a soldier, the fights, the deaths, facing the unknown with worries about the “silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous.” The mood being set in Exposure indicates that soldiers, even if they show strength and hope that they will emerge from the war victorious like that in the Spring Offensive, during the war, everything is bleak and gray and without hope. Exposure is full of the negative emotions that soldiers experience, especially when they encounter deaths in the ranks.

Spring Offensive is more about the wanting feeling of the soldiers, a wanting feeling that gives them hope, that even if it springtime, even if they know that there are deaths around them, they can still come out of the war alive and victorious. In the titles themselves, we can already see the difference between the two poems, what they are aiming for. In Exposure, Owens strips the hopeful soldiers of their hopes and shows the readers that even if they are so strong while they are fighting, these soldiers are any other human.

They feel misery, they feel disillusioned, they feel scared about dying, they question things. Owens shows us that soldiers are not devoid of human feelings, feelings that we normally feel throughout our daily lives. Even if these soldiers are trained not to be scared, and to act tough, they, too, feel the negative emotions we are feeling. . That is why Exposure is very different from Spring Offensive. In Spring Offensive, Owens wants us to see how calm the soldiers are in facing violence and death.

Springtime is the time when flowers bloom, when trees wave their green leaves. It is a symbol of hope. That is how the soldiers feel before the battle. They are full of hope, they pump themselves with the feeling that after the war, there is springtime. That even if they offend the nature’s way of showing peace and calm, they will become victorious and they will become our country’s springtime. Aside from the titles themselves, the poems also show their different points of view through the words used within the poems.

As mentioned above, Exposure uses darker words compared to Spring Offensive, which uses a softer language. The language in Exposure is harsher, piercing one’s soul, stressing the negative things that soldiers experience in war. Spring Offensive has a more mellow tone, like the “shades of the last hill,” it shows us that even if they are facing their deaths, they can still lie easy and marvel about what would happen to them. The language itself softens the blow that there are deaths in war.

This is very different in Exposure as death seems so dark in it. As Exposure shows as that they are passive sufferers of war and death, Spring Offensive shows us too that they are passive sufferers though it has a much lighter tone. Exposure has short lines but they seem like they are hanging verses, like how soldiers are just hanging on to their lives. Spring Offensive has a definite end in the verses which makes the reader feel like although the soldiers have to face death, they are firm and strong about their cause.