📖 Key Terms

📖 Key Terms

Pararhyme

Also called half-rhyme or slant rhyme: two words that share the same consonant sounds but differ in their vowel sounds (e.g. "knive us / nervous", "snow / now"). Owen uses pararhyme to create a sense of things being almost-right but not quite -- structurally enacting his argument about a war that makes no sense and offers no resolution.

Pathetic fallacy

When the weather or natural environment reflects or shapes human emotional states. Owen inverts the usual usage: his weather is not a backdrop to human feeling but an active, hostile presence -- nature becomes the aggressor in a poem where the enemy army barely appears.

Motif

A recurring image, phrase, or idea that carries thematic weight throughout a poem. In "Exposure", the cold, the refrain "But nothing happens", and the repeated references to darkness/greyness are all motifs Owen uses to build his argument about futility.

Rhetorical question

A question asked for effect rather than expecting an answer. "Is it that we are dying?" is not a genuine enquiry -- it is a way of conveying exhaustion and uncertainty so complete that the speaker cannot tell whether he is already in the process of dying. Owen uses it to make the reader feel the soldiers' disorientation.

Persona

The voice or speaker Owen constructs in the poem. Owen writes as part of a collective ("our", "we") -- a soldier-speaker who represents all the men in the trench, not any one individual. This collective voice is itself a structural argument: no one soldier's experience is unique; all are equally exposed.