Strange Meeting (Redux)

This isn't meant to be some sort of oral commentary wannabe on Wilfred Owen's life and works. But I realise that when I mentioned Strange Meeting a short while back, a lot of people actually clicked on the link and found little of use there. That's because I've been thinking about the poem for almost 25 years now, but never actually wrote down what I thought about it (except during the 'O'-level examinations almost that long ago).

So I suppose I should say something about it, once again cautioning people that this is my own opinion and that in no way does it express an official viewpoint, an academically-qualified exegesis, or any other form of interpretation on which careers may be built or scuttled. It isn't literary analysis.

This is what I think.

Let's begin with context. I think that Strange Meeting is largely indebted to Shelley's incredibly long (but, for its time, not unusually so) poem The Revolt of Islam. Read Canto 5, verses 10-13 (or X to XIII), if you want to see what I mean (you can even read it from verse 1, if you want). We can suspect this because a copy of Shelley's works was given to Owen for his 21st birthday by his siblings. What's telling, however, is that he stops at XIII. XIV (well, verse 14) is the beginning of the triumphal return which Owen never includes. But at this point, we are beginning to lose the thread, for Shelley's poem is about reconciliation between Christianity and Islam.

So what is the thread? Psychologically, the poem clearly contains structures which imply mirroring, reflection, the dopplegänger effect. It is obvious to most that the dead soldiers who meet here, the man and his enemy, are very alike; and also that they have discovered this likeness, this similar sadness and regret, at the immediate point of death, just before final dissolution or whatever else awaits them beyond the terminus of life and death.

This perspective is common to many forms of heroic narrative, for this kind of narrative begins with the special birth of the protagonist and ends with a special death which mirrors the birth. Here, Owen's poem actually depicts the ending of the hero's journey. The tunnels, the subterranean setting – all these are a return to the womb. The hero is completing the last stage; having done his job, he is returning to the fundamental chaos or underlying structure of eternity. It is the 'drawing-down of blinds' found at the end of Anthem for Doomed Youth.

So if this is true, why the encounter on the way home? It is clear that Owen intends to show the essential brotherhood of soldiers, that (just as in Dulce et Decorum est) all are subject to the same Lie. In effect, Anthem, Dulce et Decorum and Meeting form a triptych about death in wartime – the first lays it out formally, with the sanctity of a churchyard elegy; the second is frenzied and manic in its portrayal of vileness; the third completes the picture. And all three interrogate God implicitly, with questions about meaning and truth and the worth of a life; all three speak with the same voice, with a complicity and shared burden of experience.

In the end, Meeting is about ambiguity and the lack of answers. The poem's second voice hints at something higher than the sad condition of humanity which brought the protagonist and antagonist (are they the same person, perhaps?) to this same place of death. And yet, there is no clear vision about what it was that was greater or higher or better than this. War is a dead end – the chariot wheels are clogged and man has reversed his progress – but is there anything better? Perhaps we have to be content with the fact that there are heroes who try and, in the end though they come to grief, know that they tried for something better.