“Strange Meeting” by Wilfred Owen explores an extraordinary encounter between two enemy combatants in the midst of battle. Owen forgoes the familiar poetics of glory and honor associated with war and, instead, constructs a balance between graphic reality and compassion for the entrenched soldier. Indeed, the poetic charm of the text derives from pity and sympathy for the characters of the work rather than from an exaggerated idea of the characters' heroism. Owen makes this appeal through both narrative and device. First, the narrative in the poem is built on the sharing of humanity, especially in the face of death, between the speaker and the stranger, evoking the reader's sympathies for the young. Secondly, consonance, semantic connotation, onomatopoeia and tone subtly create an impression of the pitiful situation of the characters. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The poem begins with the protagonist, a soldier, moving through a tunnel to escape the battle. He says, “It seemed I had run from the battle / Down a deep, dark tunnel” (1-2). The tunnel is deep as the upper realistic world is now silent; in fact, the surreal quality of an underworld makes it seem like you're just running away from battle. The tunnel itself is carved through long-shaped “granites” from previous “titanic wars,” reminding the reader of the endless timeline of man's war and helping to establish the epic quality of the poem (3). He continues, “Yet even the encumbered sleepers groaned, / Too quick in thought or death to be troubled” (4-5). His separation from the battle allows him a new perspective. Here, a few steps away from the war, lie the soldiers in transition towards death. The fact that they are too quick in death to be bothered suggests that this is their place to be burdened by death, especially since it is much more peaceful to die in the dreamlike underground than in the battle that rages on the surface. After a soldier stands to acknowledge him, the speaker observes the stranger: With piteous recognition in his staring eyes, raising his anguished hands, as if to bless. And from his smile, I recognized that gloomy room, - From his dead smile I knew we were in Hell. (7-10)The “compassionate recognition” suggests many meanings. As the soldier stares at the speaker, he may recognize him (perhaps a sort of foreshadowing given the conclusion of the poem) and pity the speaker's plight because he too is caught up in the war. It may be that the soldier's "fixed eyes" are themselves pitiful, that they are covered by images of the fallen. Additionally, line eight contains several occurrences of the letter “s,” which has a great deal of consonance. This consonance, given the context, evokes the sound of the shallow, labored breathing of dying soldiers. Combined with the semantic interpretations of the line, we have both image and sound: the image of a shocked man recognizing an unexpected face; the sound of dying soldiers breathing hard. The speaker continues: With a thousand sorrows the face of that vision crumbled; Yet no blood came there from the upper story, And no rifle boomed, or down the chimneys groaned. “Strange friend,” I said, “there is no reason to cry.” (11-4) The speaker's use of the term “garnet” has particularly important connotations. First, we get the impression that the sufferings of war have, in a sense, erased this soldier's identity; his face is simply a canvas of the pain he has enduredgrainy, black and white photography from the First World War era, in which the faces of individual men are almost indiscernible. The speaker informs the stranger that he has no reason to seem so bothered, as they are safe from the war above. Indeed, the onomatopoeia in the words "struck" and "flues made to groan" brings a certain degree of momentary reality (as much as can be afforded by the recitation of the poem) to otherwise cold descriptions of the battle. The stranger replies: "No one[…] saves the lost years, / Despair. Whatever your hope, / it was my life too” (15-7). The soldier claims that the real losses, the real reason for mourning, are the years spent in war and the years that will never come. In fact, he says, “save the lost years”, as if his words were a command. The last words of the soldier's sentence, “despair”, are forced onto a new line; the pause that precedes and follows forces the word to linger in the reader's mind, giving us a slight glimpse of this man's desperation. Most importantly, the stranger invokes the common bond he and the speaker have they share. Both men had a life before the war; now, only the hopes of the speaker remain alive. The stranger continues: Now the men will be satisfied with what we have ruined, or, discontented, they will boil to death swift with the swiftness of the tiger. No one will break ranks, yet nations move away from progress. (26-9) In these lines, the desperation of the stranger discussed in the previous paragraph is mythologized. His feeling of desperation is not isolated from his personal condition. Rather, he despairs for all men, men numbed by the sights, sounds and tragedies of war. Indeed, he fears that people will become content with the evils of war and that the beauty of the world will be ruined. The fact that the stranger invokes the image of the [T]igress (the river on which the first great human civilizations were built) suggests that this satisfaction for the blood shed is historical, that the sensibilities of the combatants have been deafened by the wars of the past . Worse, complacency with such offenses will only promise more conflict as men will refuse to defy historical precedents of warfare – or “break ranks” – even if their nations cease to prosper. In lines 30 to 39, the strange soldier considers how he, given his life, could save humanity from its depravity: Courage was mine, and I had mystery, Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery: Losing march of this world in retreat In 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, even with truths that lie too deep to be defiled. I would have poured out my spirit without ceasing, but not through the wounds; not about stopping the war. The men's foreheads bled where there were no wounds. (30-9)Courage to fight brought no satisfaction. It carried only mystery: the mystery of never knowing the years of his later life, of never knowing peace and old age. Yet, in his death, he has wisdom. Indeed, by invoking the notion of mastery, he seems to suggest that wisdom has taught him to ignore the drums of courage in favor of peace, that wisdom has given him a mastery over settling for war. Now he knows that it is wiser to avoid combat, to "lose the gear" in combat, the consonance of those words evocative of the synchronized steps of soldiers on parade. If he could live, he would return to the weary fighters and wash their bloody chariots, pouring into them truths and sympathies too abiding, too intrinsically human,., 2005. 891-2.
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