ENGLISH LANGUAGE (CML) — COVER SHEET FOR ASSESSED WORK

(This sheet should be completed and included at the beginning of all assessed work in English Language)

Student number: M00466131

Module code: ELS2303

Module title: Twentieth-Century Literature: Modernity to Present

Module coordinator: Cato Marks

Coursework exercise number and type (e.g. ‘coursework one, essay’):

Formative essay 2013

Question number (where this applies): 5

Submission deadline: 18.11.2013

Tick here to indicate that you have checked each part of the checklist below:

Checklist:

Before I have handed in my work I have made sure that it contains:

a) appropriate spelling and grammatical choices;

b) accurate references showing the exact sources of quotations and ideas, and their relationship to my own work;

c) accurate bibliography and references following conventions explained in the English Language style and presentation guidelines;

d) an accurate response to the coursework instructions, following all assessment guidelines

e) systematic consistency with the English Language style and presentation guidelines

f) no unacknowledged use of the work of other people or sources

RELIGIOUS DISBELIEF IN WILFRED OWEN’S EXPOSURE

Edward Thomas said: “I they also serve who only sit and write, poets are doing their work well.

Several of them, it seems to me, with names known and unknown, have been turned into poets by

the war, printing verse now for the first time”. It is interesting to consider that the First World War

was so horrendous, but it still produced a poet as amazing as Wilfred Owen. The normal reaction that

people have in dire circumstances is that they turn to God. But Owen turned towards poetry. One

way to explain it would be that he could not pray, simply because he did not believe in religion and

god anymore. The poetry became his sermon to the fellow soldiers and a prayer for himself. This

essay argues that in the poem Exposure, Wilfred Owen describes how the horrors of war made

soldiers forget their religion. It also makes a point that the nature – as an image of god – turned

against the soldiers.

Many religions claim that God is everywhere; in the water, sun, plants. Nothing was further from the

truth for the soldiers in the World War, because it seemed that the God abandoned them. In the first

lines of the poem, the author states that “Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that/knive

us…”. These two lines show the belief of soldiers that the God, who is in everything, abandoned

them. He cannot be found in the merciless winds, to help ease the cold of the soldiers. The image of

godless and unfriendly nature continues with the line “watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on

the wire”. It is as if the soldiers were losing their sanity, because the author used the verb “watching”

to describe “hearing”. The feeling that a greater force is playing with the soldiers is constant because

of the way the author describes the silence and the flares that “confuse” them.

With the shocking seemingly rhetorical question “What are we doing here?” the author actually asks

the God for some sort of an explanation as to why must he endure the horrors. It signifies that the

soldiers are turning to religion, that they want to believe in something. “But nothing happens” and

the question is again if God really exists. The soldiers are constantly let down by their belief in

religion. They cannot understand why somebody would subject them to so much suffering.

The confusion of the war is visible when the author connects a positive image of “dawn” with the

adjective “poignant”. Dawn is essentially something that people in normal life look forward to, it

symbolizes a beginning. But in this poem, in the midst of the war, even dawn is not something to look

forward to. The war is everlasting, like the rain and the clouds. Something so common that they are

used to it by now. It has become their everyday.

Less deathly than the air

Because the author lost his religion, he can now only “back on forgotten dreams”. It is the mental

and physical exhaustion and the author is half dreaming of birds and blossoms. He feels like he is

dying and that his ghost is going back home. It shows the general view that one must first die in order

to get home. The war seems endless, there is no savior in mould of Messiah that would end the war.

His fellow soldiers and he must “turn back to [their] dying”. This shows a certain finiteness of life.

Unlike Jesus, who was resurrected from the dead, the dead comrades will never be alive again.

Besides losing his faith in God, the author loses his faith in the world being good again when he says

that “we believe not otherwise can king fires burn/Nor ever suns smile true on child, or field, or

fruit.” There is no optimism, only war everywhere. Even though the fire itself can be a positive image

because it provides heat and light, the author will never see the positive side of it again. His only

connotation of fire will now be the destruction that the fire has caused to the world. The author

finishes this darkest stanza where he lost the faith in the world with the meaningful line: “For love of

God seems dying.” This is a pretty straightforward line and sums up the main point that the author

was trying to make in the other stanzas.

In the last stanza, the author emphasizes the absence of emotion, pity and feeling. As if the men

were not human, but machines, with no capacity for emotion. It is stated that “All their eyes are ice”.

This is not something that goes along with religious ritual of burial, where the dead enjoy highest

honour, and people weep for them. This is a clear indication of a lack of religion. Even more, it shows

a lack of empathy, a high value in any religion. It begs the question whether the god would allow this

to happen if he really existed.

All these images of nature that tries to hurt the soldiers symbolize the lack of god. The common

belief is that God is good, therefore he would never hurt the people. So the explanation is that there

simply is no god. The absence of anything sacred in the war makes the soldiers forget about religion

and god in general. It makes them forget all good values and emotions, because it is easier to survive

if one does not have any. The author goes to the extreme where he loses more that his religion. He

loses the faith in the world. He does not believe that the world can be good again, because the

greatest force – God does not exist.