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Strange Meeting in Strange Land: Wilfred Owen and Shelley
Author(s): Alan Tomlinson

Source: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring, 1993), pp. 75-95
Published by: Boston University
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ALAN TOMLINSON
Strange Meeting in Strange

Land: Wilfred Owen
and Shelley
He is all blood, dirt Se sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in

Faber's Anthology?he calls Poets "bards", a girl a "maid" & talks
about "Titanic wars"). There is every excuse for him but none for
those who like him.1
famous gibe expresses in extreme form a common

enough
reaction to the "romantic" mannerisms of Owen's mod
Yeats's style?the
erately Keatsian sensuousness of his language, the traditional repertoire

of images and phrases that he liked to draw on?but Owen's romantic
heritage is at work in his poetry more subtly and significantly than such
a response can suggest. It is common knowledge thatOwen took both
the title and the basic narrative situation of "Strange Meeting" from
Shelley's The Revolt of Islam, but the full extent and importance of his
indebtedness to Shelley has still not been explored with sufficient care
and attention. In the terms of reference within which Owen
particular,
analyzes themoral and psychological consequences of war for those who
are caught up in it are identifiably romantic ones, and, as specifically,
identifiably Shelleyan. In this regard, Owen's poetry is founded on the
form and content of articulations of some of the central ele
Shelley's
ments within the romantic tradition, and that foundation dictates the
terms of Owen's own articulation, the not of
entailing adoption only
certain metaphors, but also of the values that those metaphors seek to
enforce.
To say this is not simply to try to shift the emphasis, in statements

about Owen's debts to the romantics, away from his well-known ado
ration of Keats and to substitute Shelley, though there might be some
i. W. B. Yeats, letter to Dorothy Wellesley, 21 December 1936, The Letters of W.B.

Yeats, ed. Allen Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954) 874.
SiR, 32 (Spring 1993)
75
76 ALAN TOMLINSON
point in trying to do so, for there are ways inwhich Shelley's influence
on Owen is more and more than Keats's. It is true
pervasive important
that there are fewer references to Shelley in Owen's letters than there
are to Keats, and that Owen does not write of
Shelley in that tone of
intimate and exalted affection that he reserves for Keats. Keats was to
Owen an all but mythic embodiment of "the
poet," magically gifted
and romantically doomed, and his remarks about Keats constantly show
how strongly he identified himself with him. In a letterwritten to his
mother on 26 January 1912, however, he calls Shelley "the brightest
genius of his time, (yes, tho' / say it)."2 Owen's mother would have
known of his feelings for Keats, and so the implication ofthat emphasis
(and Owen underlined the pronoun himself) is that he wanted to stress
that he found in Shelley something that even his idol did not possess.
Shelley seems to have struck him as themore "philosophical" poet, the
one perhaps with more to teach, and "Strange can be read so
Meeting"
as to show how effective the was.
creatively teaching
The precise source of Owen's plot in Shelley's poem is the narrative
sequence that reaches its climax in stanza xin of Canto Fifth, where we
find the actual phrase that became Owen's title:
And one whose spear had pierced me, leaned beside

With quivering lips and humid eyes;?and all
Seemed like some brothers on a journey wide
Gone forth, whom now did befall
strange meeting
In a strange land, round one whom theymight call
Their friend, their chief, their father, for assay
Of peril, which had saved them from the thrall
Of death, now
suffering.
Thus the vast array
Of those fraternal bands were reconciled that day.3
The dead Laon, whose ghost is speaking these words to the poem's
narrator, was a whose songs of to freedom and
dreaming poet praise
justice had inspired a vast popular uprising against a cruel tyranny. At

the beginning of Canto Third Laon and his sister Cythna are captured
by some of the tyrant's soldiers, who prepare to carry Cythna off into
slavery. Laon stabs and kills three of them but then is struck down,
2. Wilfred Owen, The Collected Letters ofWilfred Owen, ed. Harold Owen and John Bell
(London: Oxford UP, 1967) 112. See 160-61 for an example of how Owen was apt to
write of Keats.
3. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Selected Poetry, Prose and Letters, ?d. A. S. B. Glover (London:
Nonesuch P, 1951). Subsequent citations to works of Shelley are from this edition and
appear in the text.
WILFRED OWEN AND SHELLEY 77
unconscious. He awakens from this "swoon" to find that he is being

carried, as itwere, "out of battle," for his captors are bearing him up a
"steep path" from which he can see how
below,
The plain was filled with slaughter,?overthrown
The vineyards and the harvests, and the glow
Of blazing roofs shown far o'er thewhite Ocean's flow.
(3.XI)
The soldiers then take him through "a cavern in the hill" (3.xni) before
chaining him up in a cell and leaving him to die:
Then seemed it that a tameless hurricane

and bore me in its dark career
Arose,
Beyond the sun, beyond the stars thatwane
On the verge of formless space?it languished there,
And dying, left a silence lone and drear,
More horrible than famine:?in the deep
The shape of an old man did then appear,
Stately and beautiful, that dreadful sleep
His heavenly smiles dispersed, and I could wake and weep.
(3.XXVI1)
This "Hermit old" (3.XXIX) releases Laon from his chains and, having
fed and tended him, tells him of how he had studied the great writers
of the past:
had spent his livelong age

In converse with the dead, who leave the stamp
Of on many a page,
ever-burning thoughts
When are gone into the senseless
they damp
Of graves;?his spirit thus became a lamp
Of splendour, like to those on which it fed.
(4.VH1)
In the Hermit has used Laon's own
particular, words?"thy strong
genius, Laon, which foresaw / This hope" (4.xv)?and now he urges
Laon to go himself to those he has inspired, for
Perchance blood need not flow, if thou at length

Wouldst rise. . . .
If blood be shed, 'tis but a change and choice

Of bonds,?from to cowardice
slavery
A wretched fall!?Uplift they charmed voice,
78 ALAN TOMLINSON
Pour on those evil men the love that lies

within those . . .
Hovering spirit-soothing eyes.
(4.xviii and xxvin)
Laon goes and, in the ranks of "The patriot hosts" (5.VI1) besieging "The
tyrants of the Golden City" (4.XIV), he finds a long lost friend, "the
youth / Inwhom its earliest hopes my spirit found" (5?v). In the fighting
that starts up soon after this chance encounter Laon, partly through his
words and partly through the example that he sets when "One pointed
on his foe the mortal spear? / I rushed before its point, and cried
'Forbear, forbear!'" (5.VII1), is able to bring about the reconciliation
described in stanza xm.
Owen's version of this plot is much changed, and is drastically

abridged, but it is recognizably the same plot. In Owen's poem the
dreaming narrator has been given something of Laon's history, for he
has stabbed and killed an enemy shortly before a strange experience in
which "It seemed that out of battle [he] escaped /Down some profound
dull tunnel," much as Laon passes through "a cavern in the hill." He
finds himself in a "sullen hall" whose "silence" is affirmed in the line
"And no or down the flues made moan." There, "in the
guns thumped,
deep," he meets a shade who

greets him "With piteous recognition in
fixed eyes, / Lifting distressful hands as if to bless." This ghost would
seem to be that of a poet as well as a soldier, given his talk of how he
went hunting wild

After thewildest beauty in theworld,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.4
He the narrator as a friend and as a collaborator in the

greets poet's
work, telling him that "Whatever hope is yours, /Was my life also"
(16-17). The ghost then defines that hope as being that he might have
been able to turnmen away from pointless bloodshed:
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,

Iwould go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
(34-36)
4. The Collected Poems ofWilfred Owen, ed. C. Day Lewis (London: Chatto & Windus,
1963) 17-21 (lines). Subsequent quotations from Owen's poems are from this edition and
appear in the text.
In The Revolt of Islam Shelley is both the dreaming poet, recording the
dead Laon's story, and Laon himself, presented as a type of the true poet
and showing what such a poet can achieve. The Hermit expounds the
meaning of this fiction, articulating the significance of it within the
fiction itself, and thereby functioning as one of the text's warrants for
the truth of its own ideological foundation. Laon's words certainly have
inspired thisman, so much so that, at a crucial point in Laon's life, the
Hermit can the own lesson to him, and do so to
repeat poet's good
effect. The true poet's "strong genius" is seen to do itswork, and to do
it twice over. It hardly needs to be said that this is a somewhat circular
demonstration, but it is not surprising that a text shaped by a theory
should be so shaped as to suggest within itself that the theory is valid.
Perhaps that quibble crossed Owen's mind, for among the things that
he eliminates in his telescoping of Shelley's expansive and varied nar
rative are the kind of happy ending that Shelley brings the sequence to,
and any of so a reader as the Hermit.
suggestion responsive poetry
Owen condenses the three persons of this part of Shelley's fiction into
two, leaving his poets with no audience but each other, but the situation
remains the same as in Shelley's poem in all of its essentials. Owen is
both the dreaming narrator of "Strange Meeting" and the ghost who
has shared his poetic vocation and now seeks to explain its nature and
purpose to him. And the explanation is framed in such centrally romantic
terms that we might further identify the ghost as Shelley, manifesting
himself in a form conditioned by the history of Laon, and overtly
functioning as the strong precursor instructing his ephebe.
Moreover, the principal device by which Owen accomplishes this
condensation seems itself to have been taken from elsewhere in Shelley's
work, and to have been chosen because it offered a perfect model of
how to externalize internal, mental, processes without an
constructing
elaborate narrative. In the first act of Prometheus Unbound Prometheus is
told by his mother The Earth:
Ere Babylon was dust,

The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
For know there are two worlds of life and death:
One thatwhich thou beholdest; but the other
Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit
The shadows of all forms that think and live
Till death unite them and they part no more;
Dreams and the light imaginings of men,
80 ALAN TOMLINSON
And all that faith creates or love desires,

Terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes.
Owen's "sullen hall" of "Hell" corresponds to Shelley's Zoroastrian

underworld of the unconscious, "underneath the for Owen's
grave,"
narrator enters it "Down some profound dull tunnel," and finds it peo
pled with shades "Too fast in thoughtor death to be bestirred" (2, 5; my
emphasis). Among them he finds his shadow self, and he unites with
him in death. Owen's main variation of real substance in the plot that
he took from The Revolt of Islam was tomake the "strange friend" that
his narrator meets a encountered in some "other world,"
visionary spirit
out of normal time and rather than a real soldier met on a real
space,
battlefield, and tomake him a spiritual counterpart, or "double," of the
living poet. Thus Owen constructs his own ethical psychomachia by
forging a link between two of Shelley's texts, something which was
facilitated by the fact that The Revolt of Islam and Prometheus Unbound
already shared a deal of common ground. Shelley's Prometheus ends
Jupiter's power over him when he turns from hatred of Jupiter to pity
for him. This change in Prometheus' attitude is partly motivated by his
recognition that to feel hatred, and to act upon that feeling, both corrupts
his own spirit and creates enemies rather than removing them, but it
also seems to arise out of simple humaneness. When, in the first act, the
curse that Prometheus had pronounced upon Jupiter is repeated to him,
he responds:
It doth repent me: words are quick and vain;

Grief for a while is blind and so was mine.
Iwish no living thing to suffer pain.
Laon comes to oppose violence, even as a to tyranny

Similarly, response
and oppression. He tells the tyrant's soldiers that those they have killed,
"stabbed as they did sleep," were "our brethren and our friends," and
exhorts both armies:
O wherefore should ill ever flow from ill,

And pain still keener pain forever breed?
We are all brethren?even the slaves who kill
For hire, are men; and to avenge misdeed
On themisdoer, doth but Misery feed

With her own broken heart!
(5.x and xi)
Both Prometheus Unbound and The Revolt of Islam try to dramatize, as

truths discoverable from experience, certain insights and connections,
and The Revolt of Islam further develops an explicit claim that inspired
can reveal these truths to their readers, so that those readers learn
poets
them through the imaginative "experience" that the act of reading con
fers. The Revolt of Islam probably conducts its action in a world of
recognizable, ifunrealistically treated, politics and history partly because
of its desire to foreground this concern with the social and political "use"
of poetry. However, Prometheus Unbound disengages its characters and
its action from any such world, using them as ways of exploring the
mental workings of morality itself, through imagery that, as Shelley
claims in the preface, "will be found, inmany instances, to have been
drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external
actions by which they are expressed" (Shelley 435). "Strange Meeting"
seems to be trying to combine both of these modes, to be at once an
exploration of the heuristic efficacy of poetry and an exploration of the
psychology of morality, and so it compacts together elements of the
narratives of both of its source texts. In so doing it effects, in comparison
with The Revolt of Islam, a shift of emphasis away from the social or
educational benefits of poetry and towards the psychological processes
by which poetry is produced, and towards the moral inferences that
Shelley had taught Owen to draw from theworkings of those processes.
Owen's poem is founded upon Shelley's conception of what the "true
poet" is and what he does, and it exemplifies and expounds that con
ception in Shelleyan terms, as much in the relatively minor or incidental
aspects of Shelley's theory as in themore fundamental or essential ones.
For instance, inA Defence ofPoetry Shelley gives as one of the functions
of poetry that it refines and immortalizes beauty, so that, as "Strange
Meeting" expresses it, it shows itself "richlier" than in the real world,
and is no longer subject to time and change "But mocks the steady
running of the hour":
Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in
the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the
interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form,
sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred
joy to those with whom their sisters abide?abide, because there is
no portal of expression from the caverns of the
spirit which they
inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the
visitations of the divinity inman. (Shelley 1051-52)5
The ghost of Owen's dead poet characterizes the quest for such beauty
as "hunting wild /After the wildest
beauty in the world," echoing an
5. The phrase "caverns of the spirit" has a suggestive resonance in this context.
82 ALAN TOMLINSON
identification that has strongly marked Shelley's vocabulary in The Re

volt of Islam. In stanza xxxvn of Canto First the visionary woman who
is the agent through whom the dreaming poet learns the story of Laon
and Cythna tells him how her heart
had been nurtured in divinest lore:

A dying poet gave me books, and blest
With wild but holy talk the sweet unrest
In which Iwatched him as he died away. . .
And in stanza xxxvn of the twelfth and last canto, as the spirits of Laon
and Cythna, after their execution by the tyrant, are being borne in a
"charmed boat" to "The Temple of the Spirit" (xli),
ever as we sailed, our minds were full

Of love and wisdom, which would overflow
In converse and sweet, and wonderful. . . .6
wild,
Throughout the poem Shelley repeatedly associates wildness with the

inspirational nature of visionary insight and of great poetry, and does
so in contexts that show thatwhat he is thinking of as the end towards
which these things can inspire is recognition of the futility and inhu
manity of war. Even the fact that Owen's dead poet makes prophetic
statements about what theworld will be like after thewar has a Shelleyan
warrant, for part of Shelley's argument in theDefence is concerned with
his conviction that prophecy is an essential "attribute of poetry." The
poet "not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those
laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he
beholds the future in the present," and so poets "foreknow the spirit of
6. It would be a simple task to compile a substantial anthology of passages from The

Revolt the inspirational beauties of great poetry are characterized as
of Islam in which
"wild," and the two quoted examples were chosen because as a
they embrace the poem
whole, and because of the numerical coincidence of the stanzas in which they appear.
However, it isworth drawing attention to something that Shelley associates with the first
of the two. In stanza xxi of Canto First the woman looks on Laon "with eyes / Serene
yet sorrowing," and tells him that "To grieve iswise." In stanza xxxvm she tells him:
Thus the dark history doth unfold,

tale which
I knew,
but not, methinks, as others know,
For they weep not; and Wisdom had unrolled
The clouds which hide the gulf of mortal woe. . . .
In these 18 stanzas of his first canto Shelley weaves together wildness, sadness, and wisdom
in a manner that is then strikingly echoed inOwen's phrasing.
events" (Shelley 1026-27). Owen is careful to make his "true poet"

exhibit all the attributes of the romantic archetype.
But, however interesting these things may be in themselves, and
however their in Owen's text may be, are
revealing presence they fairly
incidental to Shelley's theorizing about poetry and morals, quite apart
from the extent to which they may be argued to be among the com
monplaces of romantic discourse rather than being specifically Shelleyan.
Of far more central significance for what Owen is doing in "Strange
Meeting" is Shelley's conception of empathy, the capacity for imagina
tive sympathy, as the human faculty out of which true poetry springs,
and the one to which it is addressed:
The secret of morals is love; or a out of our own nature,

great going
and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in
action, or not our own. A man, to be
thought, person, greatly
good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put

himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and
pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument
of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the
effect the cause. . . . the faculty
by acting upon Poetry strengthens
which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner
as exercise strengthens a limb. (Shelley 1032-33)7
Near the end of the preface to The Revolt of Islam Shelley clearly states
the central importance of "the sole law" of such "Love" in his poem,
saying that in it "There is no quarter given to Revenge, or Envy, or
Prejudice. Love is celebrated every where as the sole law which should
govern the moral world" (Shelley 148). In that crucial passage of the
poem, the opening of Canto Fifth, which gave Owen both the title and
the basic narrative situation for his poem, Laon, wounded in the act of
trying to stop a soldier from killing "his foe," welcomes the wound
because it can help him the better to plead the cause of love and broth
erhood:
The spear transfixed my arm thatwas uplifted

In swift expostulation, and the blood
Gushed round its point: I smiled, and?"Oh! thou gifted
With eloquence which shall not be withstood,
Flow thus!"?I cried in joy, "thou vital flood,
7. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to hear in that "the pains and pleasures of his species
must become his own" a faint of Owen's "With a thousand pains that vision's
pre-echo
face was grained"?
84 ALAN TOMLINSON
Until my heart be dry, ere thus the cause

For which thou wert aught worthy be subdued?
Ah, ye are pause,?
pale,?ye weep,?your passions
'Tis well! ye feel the truth of love's benignant laws."
(5.IX)
This leaves its traces in "Strange Meeting," where the ghost identifies
himself to the narrator as "the enemy you killed, my friend," and tells
of his hope of distilling "The pity of war" out of the experience of it,
so that
when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,

Iwould go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Iwould have poured my spirit without stint
But not wounds; not on the cess of war.
through
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
(34-39)
is narrating an actual event, whereas Owen's is but

Shelley speaker
expressing a hope?and it is a forlorn hope now, at that?but the in
forming ambition is the same in both cases, and the figure of speech
through which Owen expresses it reveals another intertextual echo of
The Revolt of Islam. In Canto Second of Shelley's poem Cythna tells
Laon that she will take his words, his poems, to the oppressed, and
There with themusic of thine own sweet spells

Will disenchant the captives, and will pour
For the despairing, from the crystal wells
Of thy deep spirit, reason's mighty lore,
And shall then abound, and arise once more.
power hope
(2.XLI1)
Moreover, with that trope Owen again forges a link between The Revolt
of Islam and another Shelley text, for Shelley also used the image of the
"wells" of poetic truth in the "Letter toMaria Gisborne" (Shelley 679),
when he reminded her of
how we
sought
Those deepest wells of passion or of thought
Wrought by wise poets in thewaste of years,
their sacred waters with our tears:
Staining
Quenching a thirst ever to be renewed!
(170-74)
In conjunction with the passage from The Revolt of Islam this has an
almost mechanical interest for the working of Owen's text, in theway
it associates the notion of deepness with thewells themselves rather than
with the poet's "spirit," and in its developing the image of "Staining"
thewaters, thereby perhaps helping to form Owen's conception of the
waters of his "sweet wells" as lying "too deep for taint."
All this suggestive echoing of words is but the outward sign of an
inward and fundamental identity of conception, and that conception is
Shelley's idea of what the true poet is, and how such a poet helps people
to live their lives. Even the seeming differences between the ways in
which Shelley and Owen work the conception are more apparent than
real. Laon actively involves himself in the armed conflicts that fill The
Revolt of Islam, whereas Owen's dead poet seems to have withdrawn
himself until the time should be ripe for him to come forth and go about
his work?"Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels."
Laon glories in his wound because it is a physical proof of his commit
ment to "the truth of Love's benignant laws." That he is wounded
through putting himself at risk to try to prevent a killing gives him the
right to say that he would die?"Flow thus . . . until my heart be dry"?
before he let violence destroy the truth, the sincerity of his pacifist
thus the cause ... be subdued." But Owen's dead
principles?"ere poet
explicitly says that his willingness to pour his "spirit without stint"
cannot be implemented "through wounds," and so perhaps implies that
to engage with violence at all, even as a willing sacrificial victim of it,
may be to surrender, damagingly, to it. To be bluntly practical, it is
certainly to run the risk of failing to make the intended point. Laon,
after all, is lucky: he is wounded in the arm, and survives. The "elo
quence" of the blood that he sheds is both supported and clarified by
the of his words, and without those words even
eloquence continuing
his own followers might have reacted differently to his being struck
down. Owen's poet is killed, and so the truth that he sought "must die
now" and remain "the truth untold." But Laon does eventually abjure
all violence, and even his final act of giving himself up to the tyrant,
and so to certain death, is undertaken in the hope of delivering Cythna
and so ensuring the survival, through her, of his creed. That the tyrant,
spurred on by a priest, reneges upon this bargain and executes Cythna
as well is one of the
sceptical, saving, ironies that Shelley works into
his narrative, and one that recognizes the unpredictability of violence,
even in the form of self-sacrifice, as a means to an end.
For both poets it is the case that the power of imaginative sympathy,
of "love," is such that it is not necessary to in warfare,
actually participate
or to in order to its nature
actually undergo any experience, appreciate
86 ALAN TOMLINSON
and significance. In the preface to The Revolt of Islam Shelley explains

that he has made the form of the poem "narrative, not didactic" in order
that it should appeal "to the common sympathies of every human
breast," relying on the capacity of the reader's imagination to respond
to his stimulation:
I have made no attempt to recommend themotives which Iwould

substitute for those at present governing mankind by methodical
and systematic argument. Iwould only awaken the feelings, so that
the reader should see the beauty of true virtue, and be incited to
those enquiries which have led to my moral and political creed,
and that of some of the sublimest intellects in the world. (Shelley
140-41)
Later in the summarized how "The circumstances of

preface, having
[his] accidental education have been favourable to" his ambition of being
a poet, Shelley argues that such an education is not by itself enough,
and that he also needs "to possess thatmore essential attribute of Poetry,
the power of awakening in others sensations like those which animate
my own bosom" (Shelley 144-45). Owen's dead poet has experienced
his own version of such an "accidental education," for he has gone
"
"hunting wild /After thewildest beauty in theworld, and has achieved
a sensitive and humane response to "The pity ofwar," and so has learned
things that he had hopes of awakening others to. Even his wistful hope
that "by my glee might many men have laughed" offers an example of
in others sensations like those which animate my own
"awakening
bosom," but it was a
knowledge and ambition than that
profounder
which had ultimately animated him:
was mine, and I had mystery,

Courage
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss themarch of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,

I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
(30-36)
sense of knowledge
"Mystery" is probably being used both in the general
difficulties which human reason is incapable of solving, and
involving
in the specific sense of the technique of a craft?here, poetic craft. In
Tennyson's "The Last Tournament" Tristram speaks of how Orpheus
"Had such a mastery of his mystery /That he could harp his wife up
out of hell" (327-28).8 Either kind of knowledge calls for "Courage," at

least on the level of imaginative daring, in order to discover and possess
it, and from either kind comes the "Wisdom" that bestows the strength
to resist and to escape from the mental of conformity
oppression prisons
and mistrust, the "vain citadels that are not walled." The has
ghost
"motives which [he] would substitute for those at present governing
"
mankind, and would seem to envisage ways inwhich he could awaken
"the feelings, so that the reader should see the beauty of true virtue."
When he makes that cryptic remark about how "Foreheads of men have
bled where no wounds were" the point may well be that themind, the
imagination, can encompass the nature of physical sufferingwithout the
body's actually having to endure it.
Owen fairly drastically revises the narrative of the symbolic fiction
that he has borrowed from Shelley, and that he does so is probably a
necessary precondition of his being able so closely to rework Shelley's
pacifist tract for his own times. But he does not revise any of the
elements of Shelley's conception of poethood, nor apply that conception
differently from how Shelley applies it, for the constitution of the tragic
paradox that Owen's poem is driving towards is still decisively Shel
leyan. It is an essential premise of "Strange Meeting" that "the great
secret" both of poetry and "of morals" should be "love," in that sense
of "a out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves
going
with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our
"
own. A poet's power to "put himself in the place of another and of
many others" is crucial. Owen would have found as much asserted in
the letters of his beloved Keats, though essentially as a descriptive state
ment about the nature of a mind, without the moral and
poet's psycho
logical argument that Shelley derives from the notion, and which is so
relevant to Owen's poem:
profoundly
As to the poetical Character itself ... it is not itself?it has no

self?it is every and has no character. ... A Poet
thing nothing?It
is themost unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no
Identity?he is continually in for?and filling some other body. . . .9
It is, then, necessary for a poet to possess, and to a very high degree,
the capacity for imaginative sympathy with others. But Owen came to
8. From "Idylls of the King," Poetical Works, Including thePlays (London: Oxford UP,
1953) 417.
9. John Keats, letter to Richard Woodhouse, 17October 1818, Letters ofJohn Keats, ed.
Robert Gittings, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford UP, 1975) 157. When he wrote "continually
in for" Keats probably meant
"informing."
88 ALAN TOMLINSON
believe that it was necessary for a soldier, if he were to survive his

experiences, to have no such capacity. In a letter of 10October 1910 to
Siegfried Sassoon, Owen writes:
The Batt. had a sheer time last week. I can find no better epithet:
because I cannot say I suffered anything; having letmy brain grow
dull: That is to say my nerves are in perfect order. ... I shall feel
again as soon as I dare, but now Imust not. (Letters 581)
This is not the simple numbness of fatigue, or the

deadening effect of
seen too much that is awful to
having really be affected by it any more.
Nor is it the fatalism of the soldier who has come to accept the likeli
hood, ifnot the certainty, of his own death, something of which Owen
had written in a letter of 31 December 1917 to his mother:
I heard the revelling of the Scotch troops, who are now dead, and
who knew they would be dead. ... I thought of the very strange
look on all faces in that ... It was not or it
camp. despair, terror,
was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, and
without expression, like a dead rabbit's. (Letters 521)
Owen's use, in the letter to Sassoon, of expressions like "having letmy

brain grow dull," and "I shall feel again as soon as I dare, but now I must
not," stresses the deliberation, the willed nature of his avoidance of
feeling, this withholding of sympathy, just as the grimly humorous
"That is to say my nerves are in order1 stresses war's inversion of
perfect
normal values, so that to be "in perfect order" is to be indifferent,
As a poem related to Meet
unfeeling.
" "Insensibility," closely "Strange
makes clear, soldiers cannot afford or even
ing, sympathy, imagination:
Happy are men who yet before they are killed

Can let their veins run cold.
Whom no compassion fleers
Or makes their feet
Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers . . .
Happy are these who lose imagination:

have to carry with ammunition . . .
They enough
Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle

Now long since ironed,
Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.
(1-5; 19-20; 28-30)
Stanza vi of "Insensibility" then distinguishes between the soldier's nec

loss of and the non-combatant war
essary imagination supporter's
merely callous choosing not to exercise it:
By choice they made themselves immune

To and whatever moans in man
pity
Before the last sea and the hapless stars;
Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;
Whatever shares
The eternal reciprocity of tears.10
(54-59)
But, if soldiers must "lose imagination" as the price of survival, poets

can only do so at the cost of their poethood. Their sharing in that
"eternal reciprocity of tears" is the very condition of their being poets.
The living poet who is the narrator of "Strange Meeting" does not
recognize his dead counterpart, though he sees the "piteous recognition"
in his eyes and addresses him as "Strange friend" because of it, and it is
important for the theme of the poem that the ghost should, conversely,
recognize him:
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.
(40-43)
There is a creative in that we cannot

ambiguity "through": readily
"frowned . . . me" from me . . .
distinguish " through "through jabbed
and killed, and so we may see the narrator's
looking through rather than
at his "enemy," his failure to see him as a fellow human being (and so
his failure to recognize him later), as a condition of his being able to kill
him. The ghost had looked at his killer in that way, and so had been
io. In his
Wilfred Owen (London: Oxford UP, 1974) Jon Stallworthy dates the com
position of "Strange Meeting" to January 1918, and that of "Insensibility" toMarch and
April 1918 (see 256, and 259-61). Thus the two poems were written close together, and
in an order that suggests a
relationship that goes further than the identity of basic theme.
After "Strange Meeting" had, as Owen may well have seen it, failed to resolve the
contradictions inherent in the bases of its fiction, he abandoned that fiction and, inwriting
"Insensibility," was able to form a fully "finished" general statement of the principles that
a kind of versified
underlay it,making gloss on the earlier poem's allegory.
90 ALAN TOMLINSON
unable to fight against him effectively. The narrator had made an effi
cient attack, "jabbed and killed," while the ghost had attempted only a
defensive manoeuver, "I parried," and even then his heart had clearly
not really been in it, for "my hands were loath and cold," and so he
died.
So, in the narrative of the poem's fiction, the narrator has killed a
man who could have been his friend and who certainly was his coun
terpart,was, like him, a poet. But, in the allegory of the poem's fiction,
he has done much more than that. As both a poet and a soldier he has
"let [his] brain grow dull," suppressed his "compassion," and lost "imag
ination"; has, in short, annulled the basis of his poethood. The real
enemy that he has killed is a part of himself, the poet in him, his "enemy"
because the faculties of imagination and compassion would, as the
ghost's fate shows, inhibit him and so make him vulnerable in battle.
Significantly, it is the dead poet rather than the living one who is able
to voice the true, the Shelleyan, poetry of this poem, to distill "The
"
pity of war, and to prophesy the future, telling how
men will go content with what we spoiled,

Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
(26-29)
Equally significantly, and with an entirely appropriate literalness, the

poem, having revealed all of this, simply stops, breaking off on a
defective half-line (it is outside both themetrical structure and the rhyme
scheme of the poem) which offers the ghost's invitation to the narrator
to join him in death: "Let us sleep now ..." thus completing the
inevitable pattern of themeeting with the double, as given in Prometheus
Unbound: "Till death unite them and they part no more. ..."
This is, of course, a paradoxical fiction. Owen has written a poem
about how and why he is incapable of writing poetry. But there ismore
to the fiction than paradox: it is, after all, "morals" as well as "poetry"
of which "The secret ... is love," and Owen's centers
great allegory
upon that romantic conception, and uses it to justify the ghost's proph
ecy that now "none will break ranks, though nations trek from prog
ress." None will do so, all will be predatorily "swift with swiftness of
the tigress," because the war has "spoiled" and "undone" the qualities
of mind and spirit thatwould work against such corruption. As Shelley
claims in theDefence:
... in other the presence or absence of poetry in its most

words,
perfect and universal form, has been found to be connected with

good and evil in conduct or habit. (Shelley 103 5)n
In Owen's poem the circumstances of this war have led to the "absence
of poetry in itsmost perfect and universal form," and all that it implies,
because people have either, like the narrator, suppressed that quality in
themselves, or like the ghost have been destroyed because they retained
it. The narrator is already, effectively, "dead," because he has killed the
better part of himself in order to live.
In this light, the way in which "Strange Meeting" concludes?or,
more fails to "conclude," is unable to say any more than it
pertinently,
does?can be said to be no accident, but rather the just and inevitable
consequence of the nature of the romantic materials that Owen is re
cycling. After all, Shelley's own texts register the difficulties that lie in
theway of the realization of the hopes that they express. In The Revolt
of Islam Laon's "strong genius" repeatedly awakens others to significant
awareness and action, but, as the forces of reaction and
just repeatedly,
repression defeat him and his followers, and in the end both he and
Cythna are dead, their shared dreams unfulfilled. It is true that the poem
ends, not with their deaths, but with their spirits being carried to
the seat
Of that star-shining spirit, whence iswrought

The strength of its dominion, good and great,
The better Genius of thisworld's estate.
There they come to know

That virtue, tho' obscured on Earth, not less
Survives all mortal change in lasting loveliness.
(12.XXXI and xxxvii)
So the dream itself survives, and the text has sought to demonstrate its
potential power, but the text does not show that power as working to
more than temporary and partial effectwithin the historical scope of the
narrative, nor does it do more, even in its visionary conclusion, than
hint at the promise of virtue's possible triumph at some unspecified time
in the future. In Prometheus Unbound, even though the plot ofthat drama
is disengaged from any even remotely recognizable political history,
11. Owen's own

view of the incompatibility between the poetic spirit and "evil in
conduct or habit"
can be seen in the rhetorical question that his brother Harold recalls his
asking: "how will Shelley show me how to hate?" (Stallworthy 131).
92 ALAN TOMLINSON
forming instead a visionary mythopoeia through which the workings

of an individual mind and conscience are explored, a similarly sceptical
balance is struck. The power of virtue does work in Prometheus but
only he is changed by it, not theworld at large. That Prometheus stops
hating Jupiter ends Jupiter's power over him, but the final dethroning
of Jupiter is brought about by Demogorgon, who does not seem in this
instance to be acting as anything more purposeful than an embodiment
of time and the changes that it inevitably brings in its train.When, in
Act 3, Scene i Jupiter asks Demogorgon "Awful shape, what art thou?"
"
the answer he receives is "Eternity. Demand no direr name. In the first
stanza of the choric lyric with which he ends the play Demogorgon
makes the same basic point:
This is the day, which down the void abysm

At the Earth-born's spell yawns for Heaven's despotism,
And Conquest is dragged captive through the deeps . . .
The "Earth-born" whose "spell" is referred to as having brought on this

day is Prometheus, and the third and last stanza of Demogorgon's lyric
reveals the nature of that spell by emphasizing the need for human
beings in general to achieve what Prometheus has achieved before such
a day can dawn:
To sufferwoes which Hope thinks infinite;

To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope tillHope creates
From its own wreck the it contemplates . . .
thing
But, despite these pointers as to how individuals can hasten the disap
pearance of the corrupting power that Jupiter represents, itwould seem
that Jupiter falls, not because Prometheus has overthrown him, but
simply because Jupiter's hour has come round at last. If it had not then
Prometheus would be "Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free," but
theworld at large would not. In both texts Shelley expresses a hope and
shapes narratives that try to validate that hope, but the texts qualify
their own trust in it, and make no easy of assent.
gestures
Both the hope and the doubt are involved in the discourse thatOwen
has inherited, and his way of using that inheritance throws the greater
weight upon the doubt. This is partly so because Owen's narrative is
shaped so as to exclude an external world inwhich poetry could be seen
at work as a or even be seen tested as such.
purifying agent, being
"Strange Meeting" is actually closer to Prometheus Unbound than it is to

The Revolt of Islam, in that it is more concerned with the internal,
individual workings of morality than with their social and historical

consequences. Those wider consequences are implied rather than being
directly presented through a developed physical action, and the nearest
that the text comes to an explicit statement of them is in the ghost's
supernatural prophecies. The content of those prophecies is validated,
not by the degree of any reader's willingness to accept such statements,
but by the accuracy of the psychological analysis from which they are
deduced, and that accuracy iswarranted, at least in part, by the implicit
appeal to the authority of the established tradition, the received dis
course, with which this text aligns itself. It is the psychological analysis
itself that is paramount, not the kind of detailed "historical" exemplifi
cation of it that Shelley attempts in The Revolt of Islam. Owen's poem
offers very little by way of historical perspective, and what little it does
offer is distinctly bleak in comparison with Shelley's visualization. Shel
ley's texts place a great deal of implicit weight on theworkings of that
process of human perfectibility that is so important in the the romantic
tradition: a cumulative in human nature and
gradual, improvement
intercourse which would eventually make the world a better place,
which would, however long itmight take, bring to pass that "day" of
which But foresees a world
Demogorgon speaks. "Strange Meeting"
that is changing for the worse rather than the better, a process inwhich
"the undone years, / The have come to a when
hopelessness" point
"Now men will content with what we The romantic tra
go spoiled."
dition of morality locates "The great secret of morals" within the indi
vidual psyche, specifically, certainly in Shelley's articulation ofthat tra
dition, within the individual imagination. But the conditions and effects
of war, especially such a "total war" as Owen found his generation
locked into, defeat the imagination. Individual moral and psychological
over those conditions and effects is, within the own
victory poem's
frame of reference, impossible.
So "Strange Meeting" is centrally concerned with the failure of some
thing, and the poem itself fails to complete its articulation of that con
cern. There is more to that, than some of the fallacy
though, application
of imitative form. The poem has to "fail," for if itwere to succeed in
rounding itself off, then what it says would not be "true," for its author
is no longer a poet. After all, as I have remarked, it is the
ghost, the
ghost of one who is no longer a poet, who composes the meaningful
poetry, and the author effectively does no more than take itdown from
dictation, dramatizing Owen's own relation to Shelley's
teachings and
examples. He can no longer say anything for himself but can only repeat
what another, better qualified now than he, has told him.
Despite Yeats's
scorn, it is not inconceivable that the pathetic disparity between such
94 ALAN TOMLINSON
as the ghost's reference to "chariot-wheels" and the contemporary

things
reality of chlorine gas and the Maxim machine gun is intentionally
implied. Yeats rightly points out the incompatibility between the ro
mantic rhetoric of Owen's poetry and early twentieth century experi
ence, but, given the values thatOwen would have seen as inhering in
the discourse that he is using, that very incompatibility can seem to be
a comment on the nature of that It is less Owen's
powerful experience.
own creative nerve that is not up to the demands of
"Strange Meeting"
than a whole cultural paradigm of what constitutes creative living and
thinking. And Shelley himself may be held to have obliquely, but truly,
sanctioned Owen's development of his conceptions, ifwe make an ironic
double application of that remark in theDefence about how "there is no
portal of expression from the caverns of the spiritwhich [the vanishing
apparitions] inhabit into the universe of things," for "Strange Meeting"
breaks down at precisely the point where it confronts that absence.
However, the absence then becomes a presence virtue of the fact that
by
this closing of the portal of expression simultaneously opens a portal of
attention to what is not cannot be
discovery, drawing being expressed,
expressed. Shelley's texts affirm certain ideals and at the same time admit
that not work in More Owen's text
they may always practice. radically,
presses the discourse that articulates those ideals to the point at which
it reveals its irrelevance to the business of living and surviving in certain
circumstances. Paradoxically, what is then revealed is not the inadequacy
of the discourse, the paradigm, but the compelling accuracy of its anal
ysis.
It should be apparent that this argument is not being conducted to
the end of reducing "Strange Meeting" to a magpie gathering of frag
ments from one of those that, to a
Shelley, compositions adopt phrase
of Shelley's own, "are to poetry what mosaic is to painting" (Defence
On the a reader's for Owen's well be
1051). contrary, respect gifts may
enhanced by an appreciation of the creative skill with which he tailors
and adapts his source material, making it over into something that is
entirely, and characteristically, his own. However, if it is his own, it is
also entirely and characteristically romantic. The borrowed images and
properties that deck the poem, and the borrowed situations out of which
its narrative is fabricated, are but the most superficial and accidental
aspect of that. At the poem's very foundation, and determining every
significant detail of itsworking, we may find the romantic ideology of
poethood, which Owen would have found dramatically embodied in
the life and career of Keats, but which he found conceptually embodied
in the writings of Shelley. And that ideology is essentially secular and
psychological rather than religious or spiritual, whatever supernatural
machinery Owen may have set inmotion around it. Jon Silkin writes
of the conclusion of "Strange Meeting":
Yet in view of Owen's upbringing as a Christian it is unfortunate

that his religion should appear so conveniently to provide that non
human sac intowhich so many human problems demanding human
resolution have been thrust. This may well not have been what
Owen intended?a track infinitely extending an escape "out of
battle"?but the parallel suggests itself.12
Iwould argue that an awareness of the implications of thematerial that

Owen is using, whatever he may be thought to have intended by using
it in theway that he does, would show that "parallel" to be nothing of
the kind, to have very little to do with the bleak recognition that the
breaks down on. Owen's romanticism is not, as is still too often
poem
and too asserted, a source of weakness in the execution of
loosely only
his poetry, but rather a source of much of its strength of conception.
That the very strength of this conception should ultimately overpower
"Strange Meeting," virtually forcing the text to subvert itself,may not
have been any part of Owen's conscious design for the poem, but it can
be taken as a tribute to his and even as a creative
genuine precursors,
renewal of the discourse that he inherited from them. "Strange Meeting"
professes the romantic creed as firmly as do the Shelley texts from which
it derives, and it contrives resourceful new of that creed.
applications
Culver City, California
12. Jon Silkin, Out ofBattle: The Poetry of theGreat War (London: Oxford UP, 1972) 238.

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Strange Meeting in Strange Land: Wilfred Owen and Shelley

Author(s): Alan Tomlinson

Strange Meeting in Strange

He is all blood, dirt Se sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in

famous gibe expresses in extreme form a common

erately Keatsian sensuousness of his language, the traditional repertoire

To say this is not simply to try to shift the emphasis, in statements

i. W. B. Yeats, letter to Dorothy Wellesley, 21 December 1936, The Letters of W.B.

SiR, 32 (Spring 1993)

find the actual phrase that became Owen's title:

And one whose spear had pierced me, leaned beside

justice had inspired a vast popular uprising against a cruel tyranny. At

appear in the text.

unconscious. He awakens from this "swoon" to find that he is being

Then seemed it that a tameless hurricane

had spent his livelong age

Perchance blood need not flow, if thou at length

If blood be shed, 'tis but a change and choice

Pour on those evil men the love that lies

(4.xviii and xxvin)

Owen's version of this plot is much changed, and is drastically

deep," he meets a shade who

went hunting wild

He the narrator as a friend and as a collaborator in the

Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,

Ere Babylon was dust,

And all that faith creates or love desires,

Owen's "sullen hall" of "Hell" corresponds to Shelley's Zoroastrian

It doth repent me: words are quick and vain;

Laon comes to oppose violence, even as a to tyranny

O wherefore should ill ever flow from ill,

On themisdoer, doth but Misery feed

Both Prometheus Unbound and The Revolt of Islam try to dramatize, as

identification that has strongly marked Shelley's vocabulary in The Re

had been nurtured in divinest lore:

ever as we sailed, our minds were full

Throughout the poem Shelley repeatedly associates wildness with the

6. It would be a simple task to compile a substantial anthology of passages from The

Thus the dark history doth unfold,

events" (Shelley 1026-27). Owen is careful to make his "true poet"

The secret of morals is love; or a out of our own nature,

good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put

The spear transfixed my arm thatwas uplifted

Until my heart be dry, ere thus the cause

when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,

is narrating an actual event, whereas Owen's is but

There with themusic of thine own sweet spells

and significance. In the preface to The Revolt of Islam Shelley explains

I have made no attempt to recommend themotives which Iwould

Later in the summarized how "The circumstances of

was mine, and I had mystery,

Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,

out of hell" (327-28).8 Either kind of knowledge calls for "Courage," at

As to the poetical Character itself ... it is not itself?it has no

believe that it was necessary for a soldier, if he were to survive his

This is not the simple numbness of fatigue, or the

Owen's use, in the letter to Sassoon, of expressions like "having letmy

Happy are men who yet before they are killed

Happy are these who lose imagination:

Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle

Stanza vi of "Insensibility" then distinguishes between the soldier's nec

merely callous choosing not to exercise it: