“Strange Meeting” is a poem about war by Wilfred Owen.
Instead of focusing on heroic deeds
or grand victories, the poem treats war as horrifying, wasteful, and dehumanising: in the words
of the enemy soldier, it presents the “pity of war distilled.” According to the poem, war destroys
the landscape in which it is fought; it erodes the natural solidarity between human beings,
turning people who might be friends into mortal enemies; and it robs the soldiers who fight of
their capacity to speak truth to power—to resist the wars in which they give their lives. What's
more, the trauma of war lingers even after the battle is over.
As he sets the scene of the poem—describing the deep, dark tunnel in which he finds himself
—the speaker describes war as a fundamentally destructive force. Indeed, “titanic wars” have
cut the tunnel in which the speaker finds himself. In other words, war created “Hell” itself. And
though the tunnel is protected from the battle above, it leaves its mark on the soldiers stuck
below: the enemy’s soldier’s face is “grained” with “a thousand fears” even in Hell (that is, you
can see the fear and anxiety forever etched on this soldier's face). The violence of the battle
has even deprived the enemy soldier of his humanity. Instead of being a full human being, he
is a “vision”: he has been reduced to being a spectre or a ghost. The speaker thus portrays war
as a force that permanently damages and diminishes both the landscape and the people who
fight it.
In his long speech, the enemy soldier picks up on this theme. Instead of granting him dignity
and immortality through heroic deeds, war has robbed him of hope and life. The enemy
soldier’s key hope is that he would be able to tell people about the horrors of war, and thus
prevent future wars. However, because he has been killed in battle, he won’t be able to convey
this message to the world—and, as a result, the world will continue to go to war without
questioning why their governments resort to violence: “none will break ranks.” Just as the war
has diminished the enemy soldier’s own humanity, making him into a “vision” instead of a full
human being, so too it will continue to deprive other people of their humanity: they will become,
he notes, like violent animals: “swift” as the “tigress.”
Though the enemy soldier hopes that people might be convinced—if only they knew the truth
of war—to turn away from violence, he doesn’t see any way that this hope will come true: he’s
been killed in battle and his death will serve to justify more killing. And, in a cruel irony revealed
only at the end of the poem, he was killed by the poem's speaker—the very person to whom
he addresses his long meditation on the futility of war. Nevertheless, the enemy soldier
addresses the speaker as "my friend," suggesting that they could've been, should've been
friends: war has obscured the natural solidarity and friendship that they should share.
Though the enemy soldier has been killed in battle, the poem takes up his message, offering it
to the reader. And in this way, the poem critiques war on the enemy soldier's behalf, asking the
reader to turn away from violence and toward reconciliation and solidarity.
