Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Strange Meeting”

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. 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 wills 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
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. Thus, the
dull tunnel and the hall get transformed into Hell
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

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. This possibility of oneness
between enemy soldiers because of the sameness of plight and inspite 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. The
soldiers’ send off to the front, as described by Owen in another of his poems ‘The
Send Off’, is best described as a clandestine affair- ‘So secretly, like wrongs
hushed-up, they went. / They were not ours: / We never heard to which front these
were sent.’ The mourning can never stop it seems even as the first soldier implores,
“here is no cause to mourn”.
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 pursuit of the ‘wildest beauty in
the world’ could arise from Owen’s indebtedness to Keats, who likewise thought
Beauty endowed immortality of a kind. However, this beauty too has to grieve on
earth at the spectacle of time and of war in particular, that can cause short shrift of
many a fine human soul and their pursuits of life affirming, enduring ideals. 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’.
Normally, who talks of pity when articulating on war? None but 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
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. The
vulnerability of the innocent victims of war, of the general populace, is similar to
that of the Trojan women drawing life affirming water from the wells, just as
Achilles’ chariot wheels got clogged in the blood of the Trojans killed in the war.
Innocence is alaways sacrificed in this pursuit of ego, material prosperity, wealth
and riches of a few individuals and nations. 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.
Embracing a pacifist position the poet-speaker is willing to adopt a Christ like
martyrdom in order to stop deaths, destruction and degeneration through wars. The
reference to Christ praying in the garden of Gethsemane, “Foreheads have bled
where no wounds were’, comes from Luke Chapter 22. Like Christ, Owen can
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.
Owen’s unworldly idealism had its immediate predecessor in Shelley and it is ‘The
Revolt of Islam’, that proves to be an inspiration for ‘Strange Meeting’. In
Shelley’s text, friends and enemies are reconciled like brothers, ‘whom now
strange meeting did befall, in a strange land’. The major difference though is
Owen’s ‘strange meeting’ takes place after death unlike Shelley’s. Owen’s
language is ornate almost echoing a semi biblical feel. He uses a unique
phenomenon of pararhyme of half-rhyme, where there is partial rhyme between
words with the same pattern of consonants but differing vowels, as in
‘groined/groaned, hall/hell, hair/hour, mastery/mystery etc.’