'STRANGE MEETING' An analysis by PDF

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‘STRANGE MEETING’ By Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) 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 ...

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‘STRANGE MEETING’ By Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) 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

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.

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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. 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. 4

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. “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

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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. 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

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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. 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.’ 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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