STRANGE MEETING

(With Explanatory Notes)

  • “Strange Meeting” is Owen’s most problematic poem.
  • It was written in the spring of 1918, the year Owen died.
  • The poem recounts the meeting in hell between the two soldiers who had fought on opposing sides.
  • No longer enemies, they find it possible to see beyond conflict and hatred in a shared awareness of “the truth untold” and the need to proclaim the truth.

  • Point of View:
  • “Strange Meeting” is written in first person
  • One can assume that the narrator is Owen.
  • Owen’s message is delivered by the second speaker in the poem.
  • We are led to a speculation that the second speaker is an apparition of the first.

Stanza One

It seemed that out of battle I escaped

Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

  • This stanza describes the narrator’s escape from war (he finds his way to hell).
  • “The profound dull tunnel” refers to the past of fallen soldiers from past wars.
  • “Titanic wars” imply not only this war, but conflicts throughout history.

Stanza Two

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared

With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall

By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

  • Owen uses words with similar connotations to evoke a sense of deep heavy sleep, almost as if he is trying to show the burden of these dead souls.
  • There is an interesting image of Hell in this stanza, one not of torment, but of bitterness and lethargy.
  • “Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.”
Join now!
  • “as if to bless” is ironic as it is a blessing in Hell.
  • The first speaker realizes that he is in Hell after seeing the dead bodies, which groaning under the burden of their suffering”
  • Owen prods one, which gets up, recognizes him and blesses him.
  • The similarity of the dead in this poem to the “living” or dying in his other poems is intentional.

Stanza Three

With a thousand pains that vision’s face was grained;

Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,

And no guns thumped, or down the flues made ...

This is a preview of the whole essay