“Yes; Quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down;
You’d treat if met where any bar is.”
This means that Hardy is puzzled by war because you would kill someone who otherwise would be your friend and go for a drink with. His poem is taken from a collection of poems entitled “Times Laughing Stocks”. This shows that Hardy was looking at the whole idea of war in an ironic way, like he does in one of his other well-known poems “The Fallen Maid”. He addresses these issues by saying that not everything in life always turns out how you expect it to be.
Both personas also explore the consequences of killing a man in battle, and the effects it has upon themselves as a human being.
Wilfred Owen would normally write very similar poems to this in the sense that he would use realistic language and colloquialisms. In some of his other poems (The Sentry, Dulce et Decorum est) Owen uses very visual language to describe the horrific conditions of war. However “Strange Meeting” is a quite surreal and dramatic poem, because Owen is writing in an old fashioned poetic style, using biblical language and the setting of the poem is not typical of Owen. He describes going underground, and the thump of guns cannot be heard. There can be many arguments to where Owen is, but I believe that he has been killed or has died, and this is why he is meeting the man he killed. (Owen also states “I knew we stood in Hell”.) This would prove a valid reason for how he came to meet the dead man. The dead man then says:
“Whatever hope is yours, was my life also”
This is related to the friend and foe paradox, because the figure is saying that he was similar to Owen, and that they could have been friends. It also can be interpreted as, “what you believed in, I did as well”. Owen was against war and wanted to tell the public about the harsh reality of war through his poems. The dead man is implying that he also had the same view upon war as Owen. Because Owen is making the man he killed so alike to himself, I think he is trying to convey that because he has experienced war and killing, he has consequently killed a part of himself. More evidence to back up the theory that the man Owen killed is part of himself can be found in the 25th line where the man says:
“The pity of war, the pity war distilled”
This was a phrase that Owen himself once used, and the fact that the dead man in this poem uses it cannot be simply coincidence. The quote above agrees with a statement in a preface that Owen wrote:
“My subject is War and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.”
However if you look at the character in Owen’s poem from a different perspective, you can say that if he has killed someone who could have been a friend, this illustrates and emphasises the pointlessness of war. The line after the one shown above is also quite significant.
“Now men will go content with what we spoiled”
This line is also referring to the fact that the people not fighting in the war had no idea what war was really like, and were happy to think of it as a glorious, righteous campaign, rather than the true horror it really was, where there were no winners.
After this follows a quite confusing section of about ten which are quite hard to find any meaning within them, but the last four lines of this section have a distinct meaning.
“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 for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint.”
I think what Owen is trying to say here is that only through telling the truth to the people will the killing stop. Also if you look at Owen’s rhyming couplets you will notice one distinct thing. His couplets do not perfectly rhyme, and this occurs in every line in the poem. Because the words do not rhyme perfectly, Owen is able to create a sense of awkwardness and tension.
His language throughout the poem, but particularly in this extract, is very biblical, leading us to believe that this is a dream-like or other worldly experience.
“Strange meeting” manages to keep a sense of drama throughout because of the elaborate and descriptive language used that make it slightly unrealistic. This proceeds throughout the poem until the penultimate two lines.
“Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold”
Owen is using realistic language in these two lines, and it makes for a good contrast, switching from the unrealistic, dramatic setting, to suddenly using language that is associated with action. This is a good way to finish as the switch from biblical language to realistic language creates a sense of urgency.
“The Man He Killed” by Thomas Hardy is quite a different poem to Owen’s “Strange meeting”. Hardy was not a war poet by any means, and in this poem he was not describing the First World War either, which was the first war when killing took place on a huge scale. Besides using non-dramatic language in his poem, Thomas Hardy seems much less bitter about the horror of war, and the mood in “The Man He Killed” seems almost jolly at some points. Unlike Owen, Hardy does not seem to have a very strong or obvious opinion about war.
“Yes; quaint and curious war is!”
Because Hardy’s poem was written before the days of the First World War, when war was still considered to be glorious and full of heroes, he does not have any knowledge of what it was actually like to witness killing on such a brutal scale, therefore he only really theorises and ponders about the whole idea of war.
However, Thomas Hardy does try to justify to himself why he killed another man, he seems as if he is trying to make an excuse:
“Because, because he was my foe; just so”
In this line, Hardy is trying to justify his killing of a man, a man that he has stated earlier in the poem that he would go for a drink with.
Owen seems very anti-war, whereas Hardy seems relatively neutral on the case of war. The way Hardy writes the poem with natural sounding rhymes and an informal style means that it sounds much more like a conversation between Hardy and the reader. I much prefer Wilfred Owen’s poem. This is because it has a darker feel to it because of the setting, also because of the language that Owen uses. His poem has lots of hidden meanings that makes the reader think more, whereas Hardy’s poem is less thought provoking and memorable, which is why I think Owen’s is the better poem, as a poem should not just be read, then put down, it should force the reader to think about its meaning and what ideas it is trying to convey.
