Speaker
“Exposure” is another memorable entry in the extraordinary output of war poetry inspired by World War One. Every imaginable aspect of the war is covered in one poem or another and the focus of this dramatic monologue spoken by an anonymous soldier is the other enemy threatening lives in the infamous trenches where so much of the war was fought. The speaker is a universalized version of the entrenched soldier who narrates his story from a first-person perspective but uses the plural pronoun “we” so situate all his brothers-in-arms into the action. None of those other soldiers are individualized into characters; the poem is a one-character story with the point being that the speaker could literally be any of the countless number of men who fought in the trenches on the front line during that long, bloody, pointless global conflict. Including, most tragically perhaps, the poet himself, who was killed in battle almost exactly one week to the hour before the treaty ending the war was signed.
