Craig Lockhart Essay

Wilfred Owen was a soldier in the First World War; in 1917 he was admitted to Craig Lockhart hospital with shell shock. He had previously written poems pre 1917 but whilst in the hospital he met Siegfried Sassoon; Sassoon had a huge influence on the way Owen wrote his poems. Owen’s main message in his poems was ‘to warn’ the public about war, as well as dis-agree with other writers such as Jessie Pope and Rupert Brooke who presented war as noble; Owen was completely against this idea of war, especially the message these other writers tried to convey. In Owen’s poem ‘Exposure’ the readers’ expectation is reversed; we expect the poem to be about exposure to enemy fire but what the men in the poem are really exposed to is the weather; this weather will eventually kill them as they die from hypothermia. In the poem the men are suffering from psychological trauma; ‘projecting’ their own madness onto nature. The reader starts to sense Owen’s own questioning of his religion, Christianity, as he can no longer believe there is an after life and presents his theme of the futility of war. The opening of ‘Exposure’ establishes the theme of psychological trauma, which is a reversal of the reader’s expectation because we expect the men to be ‘exposed’ to enemy fire; this is the first thought the reader had when thinking about ‘Exposure’. The opening line of the poem is ‘Our brains ache’, which signals to the reader a new idea and a reversal of the original expectation we have and we sense the men are ‘worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous’. The word ‘Our’ shows that collectively their ‘brains ache’ and suggests the idea of the universality of war and the fact that on both sides, the British and Germans, many men suffered from psychological trauma. Another idea could be that the men are constantly worried (paranoia) about being heard or coming under attack, hence their ‘brains ache’ with worry. Also, the use of sibilance throughout the opening creates an uneasy atmosphere and we can sense that the men themselves are uneasy; the sibilance creates a whispering sound; this constant paranoia surrounds the men that if they talk too loud they will die, which in turn creates psychological problems. This conveys the, perhaps uneasy, horror of war because what if affecting the men the most is not the constant ‘Exposure’ to enemy fire but the constant fear that they are going to be shot at. ‘Spring Offensive’ confirms Owen’s sincere lack of faith in an ‘after life’ as he questions God’s existence throughout the poem. He suggests that the hundreds, perhaps thousands of men are not going to heaven as some would like to believe but simply just dying. The consolatory myth that many once used to believe is forgotten on the front line, as the men can no longer believe in the existence of such entity. Owen suggests that there is no Christian ‘Heaven’ or ‘Hell’ but that man have created a hell on earth; there is constant dying and murder yet these men do not go anywhere. This highlights that perhaps this is the most poignant horror of war, the futility of war. In ‘Spring Offensive’ the theme of psychological trauma is again established in the opening stanza; the idea of the futility of war is also introduced. ‘Many there stood still to face the stark blank sky beyond the ridge’, shows that the men are perhaps afraid of going ‘over the top’ for the fear that if they die they will go nowhere, no heaven or hell. Owen’s own fading belief in religion and an afterlife is introduced. The men in the poem are scared about what they are going to face when the go over the ridge (trench), as they have problems with what they are going to have to do when they go over the top of the ‘ridge’; they do not like the idea of killing over people. The use of sibilance is used in the poem, as in ‘Exposure’, to effectively create a sense of unease. This is a contrast to those who ‘carelessly slept’ as they do not mind killing others in order to save themselves and at the end of ‘Spring Offensive’ we learn that these were the ones who, eventually, survived. This perhaps suggests that they themselves have no social conscience in that they are quite happy to kill human beings like themselves and perhaps have psychological problems of a different kind. The ‘stark blank sky’ could also, perhaps, be a link to astrology, with the idea from the past that the sky could show you what was in store for you in the future. A sunny day would suggest something good would happen to you and you would be fine, for example. However, the fact that they ‘face the stark blank sky’ could be because they have no future, this is the end of their lives and that their own future is stark, blank; there is no hope of them going to the Christian ‘Heaven’ or ‘Hell’, as Owen is trying to suggest that neither of these places exists, which strengthens the reader’s idea that Owen has a lack of belief in Christianity. The idea that the men are ‘stood still’ is also a link to ‘Exposure’; the men are passive in the war in that they cannot affect what is going on, which also presents the theme of the futility of war. In the opening of ‘Spring Offensive’ Owen successfully presents the themes of the futility of war and of psychological trauma and starts to establish his own belief that there is no such thing as ‘Heaven’ or ‘Hell’ in a subtle but effective manner. In ‘Exposure’ the men ‘project’ their own madness onto the wind and have a strong belief that nature, especially the wind, is against them; this comes from their psychological problems. Owen personifies the wind when he says ‘winds that knive us’ and the men start to think of the wind as ‘mad gusts’, as well as suggesting that the bullets being fired at the men are ‘less deadly than the air’.