Analysis of Strange Meeting - Layla Ammar

Analysis of Owen’s poem “Strange Meeting”
By
Layla Ammar
Supervisor
Dr. Ammar Shamil Kadhim
15th June 2020

Introduction
The Great War lasted for four years bringing out drastic changes in social, culture,
politics, economics, including literature. Due to the effects of the brutal war, the
poets themselves became war poets. Literature became the way of expression in the
depiction of reality. The writings of women and men were alike in expressing their
agony caused due to the Great War. The tone of literature shifted from that of
romantic to war and death.
Writings during that period mostly concentrated on the themes about life and death,
purpose and direction, justice, patriotism, and sacrifice. Many poems written by the
soldiers reflect the poor conditions of their living in trenches full of mud, rats,
constant shell fire, and the sight of death.
Some of the great English poets like Wilfred Owen reflected the cruel reality of the
war in their poems. As he wrote, “All a poet today can do is warn. That is why the
true poet must be truthful.” (Onion, 2018)
In a most revolutionary statement, Wilfred Owen declares himself to be an ‘activist
poet’ and not a poet who romanticizes war. And like many other young men, Wilfred
Owen intoxicated with the fervor of patriotism volunteered in the Great War of
Civilization in 1915. His earliest poems show the naivety of a young man yet to
experience the horror of the war. Gradually the reality of the war- its cruelty,
goriness, deep-suffocating trenches, gas attacks, rotting stink on the dead bodies
become the essential ingredients of his great war poems. The first-hand experience
of the unimaginable horrors of the war-shattered his youthful patriotic ideology. His
most moving English war poems Strange Meeting, Dulce et Decorum Est, Anthem
for Doomed Youth, Insensibility, and Futility are powerful meditation on the
senseless waste of millions of young lives at the altar of imperialism and ideology
of patriotism. (Woods, 2015)
T.S. Eliot considered Owen’s Strange Meeting as, “one of the most moving pieces
of verse inspired by the war/ technical achievement of great originality.” (Krueger,
2003)
Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting” is a parable on war and its horrific truth. I will
focus on the language structure, autonomy, complexities, and unity of the various
elements in the poem and whether the poem can manifest essential truth about life.
Analysis of the poem
The very opening stanza of the poem sets the theme and tone of the poem which is
related to war. The dramatic speaker of the poem narrates the incident of escaping
from war through a long and lifeless granite tunnel. The choice of diction ‘escaped’
is paradoxical.
We eventually find the speaker to be a dead soldier and death seemed to be the only
way of ‘escaping’ the piteous war.
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined. (Owen, Day, & Blunden, 1963)
Owen uses several adjectives in the first three lines. The phrases, e.g., profound dull
tunnel, through granites, titanic wars, and groined give out a hard, still, and drab
sense that goes well with the overall tone of the text. The words: profound and dull
have ironic juxtaposition.
There are lines with a run on thoughts without any punctuation marks at the end.
These enjambment lines produce a sense of conflict and unease that are similar to
the war-ridden atmosphere. (Persoon & Watson, 2015) The poem raises several
conflicts in its ambiguous and complex syntactical structure but resolves them all to
achieve unity- the pity of war.
The dramatic speaker discovers sleeping or dead soldiers all cramped up or

restrained of movements. They are groaning either immersed in thoughts or are
simply dead.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, —
By his dead smile, I knew we stood in Hell. (Owen, Day, & Blunden, 1963)
From lines 6-10 there’s a jolt and movement in the language. One of the sleepers
springs up and stares in recognition with fixed, piteous eyes on the speaker. The
waking of a dead man with a gaze of recognition, distressful hands lifted, and the
dead smile on the face draw piteous images with obvious and logical association
with the poem’s central tone.
In the third stanza, we find the speaker hinting at the surreal nature (vision's face) of
his encountering the 'other' man whom he addresses "Strange friend." The phrase
'strange friend' helps to achieve a universal association with anyone who loses life
in war. The speaker tries to calm the fear-ridden other man assuring that there's
nothing to mourn in the underworld. The earthly bloodshed, warfare, and sickness
can no longer affect them. The lines are ironic in the sense that the speaker is
considering death to be more desirable and peaceful than life on earth. Once again,
the text hinges on the objective truth and unifying tone of the poem that is a pity of
wars.
The long monologue of the ‘strange friend’ is philosophical and deep in numerous
abstract conceptions: hopelessness, undone years, hunting wild, wildest beauty, calm
in eyes, braided hair, and running of the hour. The complex lines express the feeling
of hopelessness by reflecting on objective truth about life on earth, human
aspirations, unrestrainable running out of time, regrets of unfulfilled desires, the
truth about war, and death.
There is a change in the syntax of lines 15-39 as the dead ‘strange friend’ continues
the monologue. We see the dead speaker uses personal pronouns I and my
(“Whatever hope is yours, Was my life also”) as he associates his youthful
aspirations of life on earth with that of the dramatic speaker. The paradoxical play
of emotions ‘laughter’ and ‘weeping’ gives way to the truth of a war that remains
untold. The truth is full of pity.
Lines 30-33 express pity, despair, and hopelessness in the images of ‘missing the
march.’ ‘retreating world,’ ‘vain citadels,’ ‘not walled.’ These lines generate a
powerful paradox in stating that the second speaker marched into war courageous
and skillful and with hope in progress. But he is only to discover the endeavor as
vain and hopeless.
From lines 34-39 we discover ironical undercurrent once again. The dead speaker is
compassionate and wants to go above when the madness of war has caused much
bleeding and destruction. He wants to wash the blood pouring his spirit and with the
untold truth: the pity of war. In these lines, the poem 'Strange meeting' acts as an
objective correlative as it embodies the objective truth of war itself: it's all bloody,
gory, hopeless, and piteous. The poem born of the piteous experience of war
becomes an autonomous medium that expresses this objective truth in powerful
language.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried, but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now. . . . (Owen, Day, & Blunden, 1963)
The final stanza has the cumulative effects of the overall unity of the poem. Line 40
is a simple monosyllabic line with ambiguity and paradox; in it, the dead speaker
addresses the dramatic speaker of the poem as ‘my friend.’ The use of the words
‘enemy’ and ‘friend’ are conflicting, but the idea is resolved in the one unifying tone
of the poem. The irony is this that the soldiers who fought as enemies in the war are
reconciled as friends in death, there’s no enmity any longer.
The final line “Let us sleep now. . . .” in its sheer simplicity and the elliptic ending
leaves us in ambiguity. The horror, hopelessness, and pity that war ‘distills’ is
‘escaped’ only in sleep or death. The sentence is fragmented, and the speaker seems
to be wanting to tell something more but thinks he better not do that. He doesn't
want to be bitter at the person who killed him just yesterday in the war field. The
truth about war (it’s a pity) that he learned in death and was henceforth ‘untold’ is
already expressed and he abruptly invites the listener to sleep: the only way to escape
the vanity and horror of war.
Critics such as Edmund Blouson and John Middleton Murry stress the fact that the
use of assonant endings or pararhyme “a slant or partial rhyme with words having
similar consonants before and after adds to the melancholic and subterranean tone
of the poem.” (Persoon & Watson, 2015) Most of the rhyme endings in the poem are
pararhyme that goes against the easy predictability and expectation. The pararhymes
“escaped and scooped, groaned and grained, hair and hour” build the creative tension
in the poem reminiscent of the hopelessness, sadness, waste, and uncertainty of war.
Conclusion
This poem with all its complex sentence structures, choice of diction, rhyme scheme,
paradox, irony, and ambiguities stands on its own feet as an independent entity. The
poem 'speaks itself' of the horror and pity of war without any aid of the historical
context of World War l and Owen's personal experience or intention. Strange
Meeting with its syntactic structure, interrelated meaning, tension, complexities, and
irony give out "the most precise emotive report on custom."
Strange Meeting is a valuable artifact in our twentieth-century world and culture,
that can remind us about the hopelessness, horror, and pity of human wars.
References
▪ Krueger, C. L. (2003). Encyclopedia of British writers: 19th and 20th
Centuries.
▪ Onion, A. (2018). How World War I changed literature. Retrieved from
https://www.history.com/news/how-world-war-i-changed-literature
▪ Owen, W., Day, L. C., & Blunden, E. (1963). The collected poems of
Wilfred Owen. London: Chatto & Windus.
▪ Persoon, J., & Watson, R. R. (2015). Encyclopedia of British poetry.
▪ Winn, J. A. (2008). The poetry of war. Cambridge University Press.
▪ Woods, A. (2015). WWI – Part eleven: Wilfred Owen and the muse of war.
Retrieved from https://www.marxist.com/wwi-part-eleven-wilfred-owen-
and-the-muse-of-war.htm

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Analysis of Owen’s poem “Strange Meeting”

15th June 2020

The dramatic speaker discovers sleeping or dead soldiers all cramped up or

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