Strange Meeting commentary by Mantra

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born in Oswestry, Shropshire. He took to writing poetry as a teenager. From 1913 to 1915 he worked as a language tutor, and in 1915, he returned to England to enlist in the army. After some severe experiences in the army, he was diagnosed with shellshock and transferred to Craiglockhart War Hospital, near Edinburgh. During his time at the hospital, he met Siegfried Sassoon, a renowned poet. Sassoon encouraged, influenced and transformed Owen’s poetry significantly. He returned to the army in 1918 and was awarded the Military Cross for Bravery. Sadly, he died shortly after during battle.

While in hospital, Owen experienced frightful nightmares; a frequent image that tormented him was that of war as the “mouth of hell”. This concept inspired ‘Strange Meeting’, a poem that grips the reader in the themes of the futility of war and sweeping suffering. This journey into hell is evocative of ‘The Revolt of Islam’, written by Percy Shelley, which depicts a journey through a strange land. The diction chosen by the poet burns the horrific images of battle he creates into the reader’s mind; the vivid memories of war depicted in the poem stress on the gruesome and dreadful reality of war, as opposed to what the national propaganda and campaigns would represent it as: heroic and glorious.

Owen uses para-rhymes and half-rhymes to involve the reader in the notion of the poem, “It seemed that out of battle I escaped, Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped”. In this case, the words “escaped” and “scooped” have different sounding vowels but end in similar consonants. The pitch of the second word is usually lower than the first, creating a sense of dissonance and imperfection. This structure of the poem draws the reader into the resigned, hopeless tone of the poem, “And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, By his dead smile I knew that we stood in Hell.” The reader experiences a sense of defeat with the end.

The speaker seems to be a deceased soldier, beginning his journey into hell. During his descent, he encounters another soldier who “sprang up, and stared With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,” His “strange meeting” with this soldier depicts the true terrors of war. He uses the words “dull tunnel” to refer to the poem “Rear-Guard” written by Siegfried Sassoon, which portrays a man fumbling his way through a pitch black tunnel to reach the air above, on the battlefield. He notices “there encumbered sleepers groaned, Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.” Men who had lost their lives during war were trapped in this “mouth of hell”, contained by their emotional distress and pain, unable to rest in peace and purge themselves of all their sins. Owen describes the other soldier’s expression as a “dead smile”, an oxymoronic statement, communicating the emptiness within the soldiers.

Owen used poetic devices such as onomatopoeia to seize the reader in the tones and themes of his poems. He writes that the dead, brooding soldiers “groaned”, an onomatopoeia to depict to the reader how tired and consumed these men were. He contrasts the emptiness and quiet in the tunnel with the images and sounds of war, “Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground, And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.” The reader gets a taste of some of the disturbing aspects of battle which stay etched in the speaker’s mind.

The soldier, the orator in the poem, says that he went “hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world,” which reminds the reader of Owen’s search for beauty and virtue at a younger age. He searched for beauty in “calm eyes” and “braided hair” but soon realized that it “mocks the steady running of the hour”. Owen personifies this beauty to ridicule the soldier’s ideas and notions as the world itself is dubious. The dreams of a young boy are contorted by war. He says that the older soldiers may have “laughed” at his visions, but he soon experienced the horrors of war and forgot his innocence and concepts of beauty.

The stranger tells the speaker that “men will be content with what we spoiled, Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.” He refers to other soldiers, who would be satisfied with the freedom they’ve fought for and the lives they’ve ruined, or instead, unsatisfied with their exploits; hungry and raging, their blood would boil, and the blood of their enemies would spill. Owen depicts them as hunters, predators through a metaphor comparing them to the tigress, “They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress”. The sibilance in this line gives the reader of the sense of the quick and merciless manner in which they kill enemies.

The soldier seems to speak in Owen’s voice as he reminisces and romanticizes about better days, “Courage was mine, I had mystery, Wisdom was mine, I had mastery”. Romanticism was a movement created in the late 18^th century and emphasized the inspiration, subjectivity and primacy of the individual. Owen himself embraced the idea of Romanticism and had “courage”, “mystery”, “wisdom” and “mastery”. The soldier personifies the world as “retreating” as it bears the loss of humanity and the damage of nature. He goes on to claim that “when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels, I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,” saying that he would wash away the thick blood hindering the movement of the chariots of the soldiers. This is a metaphor for the purging of the soul; the soldier claims that would help in the cleansing of soldiers impeded by all the killings they’ve done and bloodshed they’ve caused. He alludes to the line in Wordsworth’s poem ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’: “thoughts that do often lie to deep for tears”, in the line “Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.” referring to the lies and honour attributed to war, which he had signed up for initially. He claims that “Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were” referring to war thieving the spirits and twisting the psyches of men in battle.

In the last stanza, the poem’s tone takes a twist as the stranger declares, “I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in the dark…” the reader immediately gets a sense that on his journey towards hell, the speaker has encountered his own conscience which he had killed and forgotten when losing himself to war. His conscience says, “Let us sleep now…” referring their reunion and the bond they’ve regained. The poem recounts the experiences of the speaker as a soldier and the meeting between the both of them as he approaches what seems to be purgatory.

The poem ends in monosyllabic language and a conclusive tone. The soldier’s conscience forgives him and welcomes him to this journey. Owen communicates the profound damage and loss caused by the experience of war through the reminiscing of a deceased soldier. Although the poem ends on a more serene and definitive note, its vivid images create a sadness that lingers in the reader’s mind. Although the savagery and gruesomeness for this man is over, the scars and images will remain in his soul forever.