Analysis of the poem strange meeting./para rhyming.
In his reflection on war, the spirit is rightfully bitter, as his life was taken from him, having had no fulfilment before death. He says that whatever hopes he had, the narrator had also. He describes how he missed out on the life he had to live, as well as everyone else who died in war. He states that war is a cause of unnecessary pain and that he was willing to give everything to live a wild and beautiful life, but he was willing to give nothing to war. This intensifies his reasons to feel bitter and helps to set the tone of the poem
Strange Meeting' by Wilfred Owen is written to reflect upon war: a place worse than hell! It begins with the relief of one soldier as he is flung magically away from the battlefield. Only after making contact with one of the spirits does he realise where he is. It continues with a large monologue by the awakened spirit describing the waste of life caused by war. It presents many valid statements on war that can be found beneath the subject matter. It closes with the acceptance of death as the hell of war has now past. This poem contains several underlying messages as well as the subject matter, which is clearly laid out. The line 'I am the enemy you killed, my friend' best encapsulates one. The general setting of the poem as well as this leads me to the conclusion that Wilfred Owen is proposing that enemies at war can be friends outside of it. This adds further to the argument that war is senseless and evil. Another message is set out by the line 'now men will go content with what we spoiled'. This points out that men not involved in the war will feel content with their 'achievements' and wars will go on because they do not know the evil it causes. 'None will break ranks though nations trek from progress' states that no one will dare to defy convention and wars will go on, leading everyone further away from their ultimate goal of peace. Obviously, there may be more messages open for debate, but these were the ones which presented themselves to me. This poem has a reflective tone, with places of irony and bitterness. This relates well to the theme and subject matter of the poem
In his reflection on war, the spirit is rightfully bitter, as his life was taken from him, having had no fulfilment before death. He says that whatever hopes he had, the narrator had also. He describes how he missed out on the life he had to live, as well as everyone else who died in war. He states that war is a cause of unnecessary pain and that he was willing to give everything to live a wild and beautiful life, but he was willing to give nothing to war. This intensifies his reasons to feel bitter and helps to set the tone of the poem.
The rhyming couplet is associated in English verse with, among other things, the heroic couplets of John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and many other ‘Augustan’ masters of the form. But the First World War, whilst it contained undeniable heroism, was not a heroic war: the mass slaughter of men on an industrial scale was something far removed from the romanticised battles of Homer’s Trojan War or Virgil’s account of Aeneas’ conquest of Rome. Heroic couplets are not appropriate for an unheroic war. But to highlight the fact that Owen’s war must be seen as the latest and most horrific in a long line of wars, his poem calls to mind the tradition of the heroic couplet but gives it a twist: instead of rhyme, his lines come in pairs of pararhyme – half-rhyme which denies us the satisfying ‘click’ of a proper, full rhyme. So we get escaped/scooped (rather than, say,escaped and gaped), groined/groaned (instead of groined and joined, for instance), and so on. The rhymes are near-misses that keep us on edge throughout the poem, echoing the strange setting of the poem and the troubling nature of the poem’s subject matter. The ‘rhyme’ comes from the similarities between the consonants rather than the vowel sounds.
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