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STRANGE MEETING An Analysis by
STRANGE MEETING An Analysis by
STRANGE MEETING An Analysis by
An analysis by
Dr. Dhriti Ray Dalai, Asst. Professor, Dept. of English, Faculty of Arts, Banaras Hindu University
Drafted at some point between January and March 1918, ‘Strange Meeting’ is an
account of a dramatic encounter between two enemy soldiers of the First World
War. The poet, Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), fell back upon his own first had
experiences of trench warfare and opinion of war in general, to generate this
polemical piece of literature targeting the phenomenon of war. Instead, Owen
focuses on something not yet associated with war- ‘the pity of war, the pity war
distilled’. Contesting the view generated by poems like Rupert Brook’s ‘The Solider’,
Owen’s oeuvre posits that death in battle is anything but sweet, decorous and
desirable. According to Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Strange Meeting’ was Owen’s “passport
to immortality, and his elegy to the unknown warriors of all nations. “
The very opening of the poem “it seemed that …” transports the readers into
a surreal world but where a meeting is imminent. The first speaker can be assumed
to be Owen himself but it is a second soldier as a second speaker, who will pass on
the vital message of the poem. Owen would go on to later establish the second
speaker as an enemy counterpart, a German conscript. The fact that the two enemy
soldiers could share a closeness in space and emotion was unthinkable at that time
surely.
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Dr. Dhriti Ray Dalai, Asst. Professor, Dept. of English, Faculty of Arts, Banaras Hindu University
Lines1-3
The first three lines go on to set the theme of the poem with Owen recreating
scenes of trench warfare and simultaneously envisioning a nightmarish world of
dull tunnels scooped over time through hard surfaces as granite. There is also the
implication that wars have always been designed and fought since time
immemorial with the initiation done by the Titans and the Olympians, fighting a ten
year war called Titanomachy. War is the true legacy of man and he has kept the
tradition alive.
Owen also interfuses the past and the present here, as he will the future too
in the coming stanzas. It is almost a novel dimension created by Owen in this poem.
The first speaker suggests in the very first instance that he has had a lucky
providence and that he has escaped from battle. This is strange when we realize
that one could never escape from a battle, which would mean desertion, and the
psychological impact of war on the human mind has too deep a taint to be erased
or overlooked or discounted. The only escape from battle then was possibly
through death or it is an imaginary escape. Then this meeting too is an imaginary
meeting.
Lines 4-10
The possibilities of escape through death and through imagination, are both
explored here in these lines. The first speaker/soldier encounters ‘encumbered’
sleepers in the dull tunnel, weighed down by heavy artillery, ammunition, uniform
and war experiences. The ‘groans’ of these sleepers contribute further to the sense
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Dr. Dhriti Ray Dalai, Asst. Professor, Dept. of English, Faculty of Arts, Banaras Hindu University
Lines 11-13
Hell is no longer the afterlife location imagined by religious texts but a place created
by men, as the battlefield or the war zone. Hell is also a state of existence, a state
of mind where pain and suffering outweigh happiness and pleasure. Though no
blood reached this underground location, no sound and sight from the war raging
above could outrightly effect the second soldier, still the impact of war and the
resonance is carried along. Here ‘no guns thumped’, the ‘flues’ (pipes or tubes
aiding in ventilation in the trenches) carried no moaning sound from above, yet the
second soldier is caught in a perpetual state of thousand fears, pertaining to either
deformity or death or the pitilessness of war. This imaginary underground meeting
of the two soldiers lays bare the trauma of war on the mind, heart and soul of
innocent soldiers who fight for no just cause any longer.
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Dr. Dhriti Ray Dalai, Asst. Professor, Dept. of English, Faculty of Arts, Banaras Hindu University
Line 14
This is the point in the poem where the two soldiers seem to address each other
directly without any interference. The pitilessness that characterize war, the
jingoism and xenophobia that fuel war propaganda are in the process of being
nullified here by Owen in this line. The first soldier/speaker addresses the second
soldier/speaker as a ‘strange friend’- ‘strange’ because friendship between enemy
soldiers had never been approved of or imagined.
Lines -15-29
The true message of Owen gets represented in this section through the voice of
the German conscript, our second soldier. These lines offer Owen’s insight into
truth, i.e. the meaninglessness of war, the senseless killing of innocents, the
retrogression of humanity and the overall disintegration of values. The two soldiers
begin to appreciate and acknowledge the shared similarities.
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Dr. Dhriti Ray Dalai, Asst. Professor, Dept. of English, Faculty of Arts, Banaras Hindu University
The ‘undone years’ are referring to the future both have been denied access to. It
is part of the many sacrifices made by such young naïve men joining a war not their
making. Death has cut short their lives and any hope of a normal life has also been
lost forever.
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Dr. Dhriti Ray Dalai, Asst. Professor, Dept. of English, Faculty of Arts, Banaras Hindu University
Owen, for whom, ‘poetry is in the pity’- the overwhelming feeling of sadness at war
and the mayhem it causes and for what?
The answer follows in that man seeks more and more riches, comforts,
control over means. With man’s overambitious nature and insatiable hunger,
future wars are imminent and a foregone conclusion- ‘now men will go content
with what we spoiled. / Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled. ’ Future wars
will have no ethics too, no qualms, no doubts; they will be fought with no hesitation
and with the ‘swiftness of the tigress’. The prophetic vison of the German conscript
contains a picture of the retrogression of humanity, where ‘nations trek from
progress’, moving away from the civilizational values, humanitarian values. We are
finally realizing the portent of Yeats’ apocalyptic lines from ‘The Second Coming’,
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’
Lines 30-31
At such trying times, Owen refers to the role of the poet, working with a sense of
obligation, not personal or aesthetic but social and political. His job is to warn
posterity about the repercussions of such violent acts – “a poet can only warn”.
Like the poet, the second speaker can claim un-contamination at the hands of
declining civilization, as he retains ‘courage’ to speak and has ‘wisdom’ to share -
‘courage was mine and I had mystery, wisdom was mine and I had mastery.’
Lines 32- 39
The fusion of the past and the present as achieved earlier in the poem is recreated
here again in this section, where there is an absolute fine merging of the varying
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Dr. Dhriti Ray Dalai, Asst. Professor, Dept. of English, Faculty of Arts, Banaras Hindu University
aspects of time into one universal continuum. The theme discussed is similarly a
perennial theme- war and humanity, which has always remained a constant over
time. Humanity has always lived under the guise of civilization but in reality, there
has always been barbarity and violence underneath this garb of sophistication.
Man’s has always been a perennial regressive march into chaos, disorder, mayhem.
‘Citadels’, as places of protection are ‘vain’ and they are not ‘walled’, meaning they
are useless- there can be no protection for mankind as wars rage.
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Dr. Dhriti Ray Dalai, Asst. Professor, Dept. of English, Faculty of Arts, Banaras Hindu University
endure psychological suffering, agony, if that meant no more wars, no more taxes,
generated to fuel wars.
Lines 40-44
The essential distinction of war between ‘I’ and ‘you’, between’ enemy’ and ‘friend’
is problematized by Owen here. What appears is that the first speaker has caused
the death of the second, even as he attempted to deflect a bayonet. In spite of such
show of aggression on the part of the first soldier, leading to death, there is no
lingering animosity in the ‘enemy’ soldier, who can only lift “distressful hands, as if
to bless”. Violence and aggression are replaced by an almost unbelievable call for
truce and reconciliation- “let us sleep now” tired of the games people play.
A Study Material prepared for the B.A Sem-IV, Under Graduate Students (B.H.U)
Dr. Dhriti Ray Dalai, Asst. Professor, Dept. of English, Faculty of Arts, Banaras Hindu University
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