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Learn More. “Strange Meeting” was written by the British poet Wilfred Owen. A soldier in the First World War, Owen wrote “Strange Meeting” sometime during 1918 while serving on the Western Front (though the poem was not published until 1919, after Owen had been killed in battle). The poem's speaker, who is also a solider, has descended ...
Marc D. Cyr. II. Wilfred Owen is the best-known war poet in English-language literature, and "Strange Meeting" is arguably not just his most famous poem, but his best. Siegfried Sassoon, his friend and mentor, and the editor of the first fairly extensive collection of Owen's poems, judged it to be his "mas terpiece" (Siegfried's Journey 59 ...
Strange Meeting. Through granites which titanic wars had groined. Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless. By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell. And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan. “Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”. The hopelessness.
Apr 7, 2023 · 773096Strange Meeting. Versions of Strange Meeting include: Strange Meeting in Poems by Wilfred Owen. London: Chatto and Windus. 1920. Strange Meeting (Blunden ed. 1931) edited by Edmund Blunden, 1931. Categories: Versions pages. Modern poetry. War.
- 'Strange Meeting' Summary
- Analysis of 'Strange Meeting' Lines 1-22
- Further Analysis Lines 23-44
- What Are The Metre and Rhyme Scheme?
- Sources
'Strange Meeting' is a poem about reconciliation. Two soldiers meet up in an imagined Hell, the first having killed the second in battle. Their moving dialogue is one of the most poignant in modern war poetry. Wilfred Owen fought and died in WW1, being fatally wounded just a week before the war ended in May 1918. By all accounts, he wanted to retur...
The title gives it away - this will be no ordinary meeting - and the opening two words add further uncertainty about the coming encounter, the speaker saying it only seemed he came straight from th...Note the pararhyme already working its magic with enjambment and alliteration to produce an opening sentence, the likes of which was new for the reader in 1920. A sense of hard, grinding history is...So, the speaker is setting the scene. Having been transported, after his own death, to this severe and shocking environment, he also comes across other soldiers who are having difficulty 'sleeping'...As the speaker tries to rouse them, one springs up, a sad and knowing look in his eyes, hands held as if in benediction. Owen's use of internal rhyme and repetition is clear in lines 7 - 10. Note p...All the emotion is ineffective now, from laughter to tears, it has died. And with it, the truth which is yet to be told. This is the truth of pity, made up of sorrow and compassion, expressed when...
Pararhyme
Strange Meeting is written in heroic couplets and there are a total of 44 lines contained in four stanzas. Note that lines 19-21 form a tercet, ending in three half-rhymes: hair/hour/here. The last line is much shorter and doesn't rhyme with any other line.
Rhyme
Owen is a master of pararhyme, where the stressed vowels differ but the consonants are similar, and he uses this technique throughout the poem. So note the end words: escaped/scooped, groined/groaned, bestirred/staredand so on. The second vowel is usually lower in pitch adding to the oddity of the sounds, bringing dissonance and a sense of failure. So whilst there is common ground between the rhymes there is equally discomfort, the feeling that something isn't quite what it should be. If Owen...
Metrical Analysis
Strange Meeting is written in iambic pentameter, that is, the de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM stress pattern dominates, but there are lines that vary and these are important because they challenge the reader to alter the emphasis on certain words and phrases. So, here are three examples to illustrate, with lines 7, 27, and 30: 1. With pit / eous re /cognit / ion in / fixed eyes, The first foot is iambic (non stress, stress ux), the second foot a pyrrhic (no stress, no stress, uu), the thir...
The Hand of the Poet, Rizzoli, 1997 Norton Anthology, Norton, 2005 100 Essential Modern Poems, Ivan Dee, Joseph Parisi, 2005 www.poetryfoundation.org © 2017 Andrew Spacey
Structure and Form. ‘ Strange Meeting ‘ is composed of four stanzas of varying lengths. This irregular structure reflects the chaotic and fragmented nature of war. The poem’s free form and inconsistent stanza lengths emphasize the disjointed experiences and the surreal, dreamlike encounter in the afterlife.
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Analysis. "Strange Meeting" is one of Wilfred Owen 's most famous, and most enigmatic, poems. It was published posthumously in 1919 in Edith Sitwell's anthology Wheels: an Anthology of Verse and a year later in Siegfried Sassoon's 1920 collection of Owen's poems. T.S. Eliot referred to "Strange Meeting" as a "technical achievement of great ...
