Compare the way Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen portray war in 'The Rear Guard' and 'Strange Meeting'.

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Laura Cole

Compare the way Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen portray war in ‘The Rear Guard’ and ‘Strange Meeting’

The first poem ‘the Rear Guard’ describes a soldier’s journey when trying to escape from the horror of the trenches.  En route he stumbles across what is described by Sassoon as a ‘sleeper’- a solider who is believed to be asleep.  After a silent response and dormant reactions to the soldier’s kick, he discovers that the ‘sleeper’ is actually a dead victim of war.  Eventually the ‘rear-guard’ is able to leave the tunnel ‘unloading hell behind him’.

In ‘Strange Meeting’, it is supposedly Owen who is the narrator telling the reader of his experience.  The narrator believes he has died and has been sent to hell, where he meets a ghost (hence the title) and is told how it is terrible to die young in war.

The poems share many similarities as well as the obvious subject of war.  Both writers portray the horror of war and it is true to say that both poems are strongly anti-war.  Examples of this include ‘Now men will go content with what we spoiled’ (from Strange Meeting) and ‘unloading hell’ (‘The Rear-Guard”).  The choice of language of the two poems also shares similarities.  Both writers use hard-hitting vocabulary, describing war unsparingly, more so in ‘The Rear-Guard’- ‘Savage he kicked an unanswering heap’ although there is evidence of this in ‘Strange Meeting’- ‘you jabbed and killed’.  Both poems use metaphorical language and both use ‘tunnels’ to assist this writing technique.  In ‘The Rear-Guard’ Sassoon uses a tunnel metaphor to convey the way in which war traps and makes escape difficult - ‘Groping along the tunnel’.  He may also be using the tunnel as a metaphor to represent the phrase of ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, as portrayed in this poem as the Rear- Guard is able to escape from the tunnel- ‘he climbed through darkness to the twilight air’.      

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It is not so easy to identify the connotations that are related to the poet’s use of a tunnel metaphor in ‘Strange Meeting’.  As in ‘The Rear-Guard’, Strange Meeting’ is also entirely set in a tunnel.  However the tunnel seems to represent something very different to that in ‘The Rear-Guard’.  It is almost as though Owen is describing the tunnel as a place of safety compared to the front line

 “out of battle I escaped

 Down some profound dull tunnel”.”

  This however could be Owen’s irony recognising that in the tunnel you are still vulnerable to the fate of ...

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