Exposure & Storm on the Island
Wilfred Owen’s ‘Exposure’
Wilfred Owen drafted ‘Exposure’ in late 1917 and revised it in 1918. It draws on the freezing weeks he had spent in the trenches early in 1917. The poem describes the agonising experience of soldiers waiting in freezing conditions, slowly dying not from enemy fire but from the cold itself. Owen’s purpose is to show that the greatest enemy in war is not the opposing army but nature — and the government that sent the soldiers there.
Owen was diagnosed with shell shock (now called PTSD) and sent to Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh, where he met Siegfried Sassoon. Owen returned to the front and was killed on 4 November 1918, exactly one week before the war ended. His mother received the telegram on Armistice Day.
“Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us” — The opening line personifies the wind as a killer (“knive us”). The verb is brutally direct. The sibilance in “merciless iced east” mimics the hissing of wind. The ellipsis that follows (“wearied we keep awake...”) creates a sense of exhausted waiting.
“But nothing happens” — This refrain ends four of the eight stanzas. Its repetition creates a devastating sense of futility. The soldiers are not dying heroically in battle — they are dying from cold, boredom, and neglect. Each repetition drains more hope from the poem.
“Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces” — The alliteration of “f” sounds personifies the snow as something sinisterly gentle, like fingers searching for skin. The snow is both beautiful and deadly — it “feels” for them, as if death itself is reaching out.
“The burying-party, picks and shovels in shaking grasp, / Pause over half-known faces” — The final stanza describes the burial of the dead. “Half-known faces” is devastating — the cold has so disfigured the bodies that their comrades can barely recognise them. The present tense makes this immediate and ongoing.
Structure of ‘Exposure’
Owen uses eight stanzas of five lines each, with a shortened final line in each stanza (called a half-line). This “dying fall” mirrors the soldiers slowly losing strength and life. The para-rhyme (e.g. “wire/war,” “snow/renew”) creates an unsettling sense of incompleteness — nothing quite resolves, just as the soldiers’ situation never resolves.
Seamus Heaney’s ‘Storm on the Island’
Seamus Heaney published ‘Storm on the Island’ in 1966. On the surface, the poem describes a community on a remote island bracing for a violent storm. However, the title contains a hidden message: “Stormont” (the seat of the Northern Irish government) is embedded in “Storm on the Island,” suggesting the poem also speaks to the sectarian tension in Northern Ireland that erupted two years later into The Troubles.
The first eight letters of the title spell “STORMONT” — the Northern Irish parliament building. Heaney, a Catholic growing up in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland, often embedded political messages within seemingly natural imagery.
“We are prepared: we build our houses squat” — The confident, declarative opening suggests readiness and resilience. “We” establishes a collective community identity. “Squat” means low and sturdy — built to withstand attack. If read politically, this suggests a community preparing for conflict.
“This wizened earth has never troubled us / With hay” — The enjambment creates a momentary surprise. The earth hasn’t “troubled” them with growing hay — i.e. nothing grows here, so there’s nothing for the wind to destroy. The barren landscape is presented as an unexpected advantage.
“spits like a tame cat / Turned savage” — The simile compares the sea to a domesticated animal that suddenly becomes wild. The familiar becomes frightening. If read politically, this mirrors how communities can turn violent during conflict.
“It is a huge nothing that we fear” — The paradoxical ending is deeply unsettling. The storm is invisible — wind has no physical form — yet it terrifies them. This suggests that the greatest fears are intangible: the threat of violence, political uncertainty, the unknown. The oxymoron “huge nothing” captures the paradox of fearing something you cannot see or control.
Comparing Owen and Heaney
Both poets present nature as a hostile, overwhelming force. Owen’s soldiers are killed by cold: “nothing happens” — the enemy is absence, exposure, waiting. Heaney’s community fears a “huge nothing” — the storm is terrifying precisely because it is invisible and unpredictable. Both poems end without resolution: Owen’s soldiers are buried; Heaney’s community is left in fear.
Structurally, Owen uses para-rhyme and half-lines to create discord and incompleteness; Heaney uses blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) and enjambment to create a conversational, almost reassuring tone that is gradually undermined. Both poets use the “we” pronoun to create collective experience — this is not individual suffering but shared, communal vulnerability.