STRANGE MEETING

By Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

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. The fact that the two enemy soldiers
could share a closeness in space and emotion was unthinkable at that time surely.
Lines 1-3
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. There is also the implication that wars have always been designed and fought
since ancient times. War is the true legacy of man and he has kept the tradition alive. 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 of uneasiness prevailing in the tunnel which gets further heightened
when on probing, one of the seemingly dead soldiers springs up and looks back with ‘piteous
recognition’ in his eyes. The ‘piteous recognition’ in the eyes of the second soldier, can come only
after previous encounters, and therein lies the hint that this encounter in the tunnel, is not the first
time these two soldiers are facing each other. They have met before. But unlike the expectations
from a war zone, the second soldier does not lift a hand to strike but to bless, and instead of
violence there is the mitigating presence of a smile on his lips, albeit a dead smile.
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 out rightly effect the second soldier, still the impact of
war and the resonance is carried along. 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.
Line 14
This is the point in the poem where the two soldiers seem to address each other directly without any
interference. 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. This
possibility of oneness between enemy soldiers because of the sameness of plight and in spite of
differences in nationality and loyalty, is what Owen seeks to highlight here as in the immediate
lines that would follow. The enemy is a fellow sufferer with whom one can surely feel solidarity.
Surely, enough, one soldier can rise up to console the other, when bureaucracy and administration
treat soldiers as mere appendages.
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. 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.
“Whatever hope is yours, was my life also”, is a reiteration of the point of sameness, of
desires and dreams of young men before they join a war. It may make us contemplate also, how the
meeting could possibly be between two soldiers, one alive, the other dead. Thus the subtle but
deliberate change in the tense. This makes the meeting ‘strange’ and possibly an imaginary one.
The second speaker then tries to validate the pursuit of certain ideals that lay not ‘calm in eyes or
braided hair’, hinting at those typical infatuations that consume the young. Instead, the ideals that
this soldier pursued were targeted to ‘mock the steady running of the hour’, such that would grant
him immortality and with an aim to end the ‘mockery’ of human enterprise and zeal at the hands of
cruel Time. The noble pursuits have come to nothing now as the young lay dying in the trenches
sans family, friends, community and with war turning men against men. With death’s final triumph
over these young brave hearts, something else too would go unsaid to the grave- ‘I mean the truth
untold, the pity of war, the pity war distilled’. 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.
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 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.
The mythological warfare is juxtaposed along all the great wars of mankind imaginatively
by Owen and the poet-speaker is associated with all. He is the omniscient and omnipresent seer.
And he even has Christ like powers of redemption, - ‘I would go up and wash them [the chariot
wheels] from sweet wells’, and ‘I would have poured my spirit without stints.’ The sudden shift of
tense lending some sort of ambiguity though, but the underlying idea is the desperation in the poet-
speaker to stop wars forever.
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.