The Full Text of “Strange Meeting”
1It seemed that out of battle I escaped
2Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
3Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
4Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
5Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
6Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
7With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
8Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
9And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—
10By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
11With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
12Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
13And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
14“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”
15“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,
16The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
17Was my life also; I went hunting wild
18After the wildest beauty in the world,
19Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
20But mocks the steady running of the hour,
21And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
22For by my glee might many men have laughed,
23And of my weeping something had been left,
24Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
25The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
26Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
27Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
28They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
29None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
30Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
31Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
32To miss the march of this retreating world
33Into vain citadels that are not walled.
34Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
35I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
36Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
37I would have poured my spirit without stint
38But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
39Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
40“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
41I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
42Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
43I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
44Let us sleep now. . . .”
The Full Text of “Strange Meeting”
1It seemed that out of battle I escaped
2Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
3Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
4Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
5Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
6Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
7With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
8Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
9And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—
10By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
11With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
12Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
13And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
14“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”
15“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,
16The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
17Was my life also; I went hunting wild
18After the wildest beauty in the world,
19Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
20But mocks the steady running of the hour,
21And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
22For by my glee might many men have laughed,
23And of my weeping something had been left,
24Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
25The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
26Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
27Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
28They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
29None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
30Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
31Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
32To miss the march of this retreating world
33Into vain citadels that are not walled.
34Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
35I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
36Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
37I would have poured my spirit without stint
38But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
39Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
40“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
41I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
42Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
43I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
44Let us sleep now. . . .”
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“Strange Meeting” Introduction
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“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 to “Hell.” There, he meets a soldier from the opposing army—who reveals at the end of the poem that the speaker was the one who killed him. The poem is deeply pessimistic as it reflects on the shared humanity of these two men and the broader horrors of war. Though the poem suggests that human beings aren't going to stop fighting anytime soon, it also calls for such violence to be replaced by reconciliation and solidarity.
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“Strange Meeting” Summary
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It seemed like I escaped from battle down into a very deep, dark tunnel—a tunnel that had been carved out of the granite bedrock by some enormous wars in the past.
Even in the tunnel, I found people moaning and suffering. They were either too deeply asleep to be stirred, or they were already dead. Then, as I poked and prodded them, one of the sleepers jumped up and stared at me. He seemed to recognize me—and he pitied me. He lifted his hands sadly, as if he were going to bless me. And I could tell from his lifeless smile that the dark hall in which we stood was Hell itself.
You could see all the fear etched into his face—even though none of the blood or violence from the battle up above reached the hall where we stood. You couldn’t hear the artillery firing down there; the guns didn’t make the chimneys in the hall groan. I said to him, “Unfamiliar friend, there’s no reason to be sad down here.” He replied: “No reason except for all the years I'm missing out on, and the loss of hope. You and I had the same hopes. I threw myself into seeking the most beautiful thing in the world, and
I'm not talking about physical beauty. This beauty makes fun of time as it steadily passes by. If this beauty is sad, its sadness is so much richer than the sadness you find down here. If I hadn't died, my happiness might have made a lot of other people happy too; and even in my sadness, I would have left something important behind, something that can’t survive down here. I’m talking about truth itself, the truth that no one talks about: the horror of war, war boiled down to its horrifying essence. Since I didn’t get to tell people how horrible war is, people will be happy with the destructive things our armies have done. Or they'll be unhappy, and they'll get so angry that they'll keep fighting and killing each other. They will be as fast as tigers. No one will speak out or disagree with their governments, even though those governments are moving society away from progress rather than towards it. I was full of courage and mystery. I was full of wisdom and expertise. I won't have to watch the world as it moves backwards, marching into cities that, foolishly, don't have fortifications. If the wheels of their armored vehicles were to get clogged with blood, I would go wash them with water from pure wells. I would wash them with truths too profoundly true to be corrupted. I would do everything I possibly could to help—except for fighting, except for taking part in more horrible war. In war, even those who aren't physically hurt suffer from mental trauma.“I am the enemy soldier you killed, my friend. I recognized you in the dark: you frowned when you saw me in just the same way as you frowned yesterday, when you killed with me with your bayonet. I tried to fend you off, but my hands were slow and clumsy. Let’s rest now…”
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“Strange Meeting” Themes
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The Horrors of War
“Strange Meeting” is a poem about war, but it doesn't focus on heroic deeds or grand victories. Instead, the poem treats war as horrifying, wasteful, and dehumanizing: in the words of the enemy soldier, it presents the “pity of war distilled.” According to the poem, war destroys the landscape in which its 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 specter 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 address 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.
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Reconciliation and Solidarity
“Strange Meeting” presents a pretty bleak view of human society, which seems unwilling to stop fighting. Yet the poem also presents that violence as a choice—something that people decide to engage in—rather than something innate to human beings. The two soldiers at the heart of the poem might very well have been friends in different circumstances. They even share the same hopes and dreams: "Whatever hope is yours, / Was my life also," the enemy soldier proclaims.
By illustrating their shared humanity, the poem suggests that war creates division where none need exist. What's more, the fact that the enemy soldier forgives the speaker in death and says they both can rest now—finally achieving some sort of peace—suggests that reconciliation and solidarity might be a sort of antidote to the horrors of war.
In his long speech at the center of the poem, the enemy soldier argues that war and violence are not necessary or even natural for human societies. Instead, he imagines that people are presented with a decision: they can move toward a peaceful world or they can “trek from progress.” In other words, they can either advance or they can slide backwards, downwards, into violence. For this reason, it's not foolish to imagine a better world—and the enemy soldier lays out some of the dynamics of that world: people will know the “truth untold” about war—that it's horrifying and not glorious—and they will work to avoid it. Indeed, he imagines himself repairing the damage caused by war, washing away the "blood" that "clogged ... chariot-wheels."
But despite this hopeful, even beautiful vision, the enemy soldier doesn’t show a lot of optimism that it will actually come to pass. Instead, he argues that people take violence as a cause for further violence, a cycle with no obvious exit. He presents this as a betrayal of the underlying possibility for solidarity and reconciliation between the people who fight each other.
The poem stages this betrayal in its final lines, where the enemy soldier reveals who killed him: the speaker himself. The enemy soldier announces, “I am the enemy you killed, my friend.” The line is paradoxical: one might wonder how the soldiers can be both enemies and friends. But the enemy soldier’s implication is clear: they are only enemies because their countries have decided to fight each other. Once all that is stripped away, they are friends again, as they were at first, before the war. Friendship, not violence and enmity, is the natural relationship between human beings.
This is a bitter irony: all the devastation, horror, and dehumanization that the poem describes is unnecessary. In fantasizing about a better world, a world in which the two soldiers are friends instead of enemies, the soldier demonstrates just how unnecessarily brutal and horrifying this world actually is.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Strange Meeting”
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Lines 1-3
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.The poem begins with the speaker escaping from battle by heading down into a deep, dark tunnel—a tunnel that "titanic wars" had "groined," or cut, into the granite bedrock beneath the battlefield. It's clear right from the start that this poem isn't going to treat war as something glorious or heroic. Note, for instance how the soldier is running away from the fighting. The reference to "titanic" wars also suggests that humanity has had a long, devastating history of violence. This might, in part, be an allusion to that actual ship the Titanic, which had sunk just six years before Owens wrote this poem; as such, the word evokes a sense of destruction and waste on a massive scale.
Note also that the speaker doesn’t say what war he’s fighting in, nor who he’s fighting against. This suggests that the war's sheer brutality and horror overshadow whatever politics started it the first place.
These lines are written in iambic pentameter, as will be the case for much of the poem: each line has, more or less, five poetic feet, each consisting of a da DUM syllable pattern. It's easy to hear this rhythm in the poem’s third line:
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
These lines also introduce the poem's pseudo rhyme scheme, which will be a combination of slant rhyme and something called pararhyme. This is when words contain the same consonant sounds in the same order (but different vowels) and can be seen with "escaped" and "scooped." The same thing will happen with "groined" and "groaned" in line 4 . Owens was known for his use of pararhyme, especially in this poem, and there will be more and more of these pairs.
The poem's rhymes, such as they are, fall into heroic couplets (rhyming couplets of iambic pentamer)—or, maybe it's more accurate to say failed heroic couplets, where the rhymes fail to fully line up. As their name suggests, heroic couplets are often used to describe heroism and bravery in idealized ways. The poem’s failed rhymes suggest that it is intentionally messing with the form, as if to show the reader what heroic couplets look like after they’ve actually been to a real battle.
The opening two lines of the poem are also enjambed—which gives a sense of the speed of the speaker’s escape from battle. Line 3 is then end-stopped, and from there forward the poem uses a lot of end-stops—which tend to cut off one line from another. There is a sense of separation, of failed reunion, in the structure of the lines (which will eventually be important to the poem thematically).
These lines also exhibit another poetic device that will be important to the poem: alliteration. For example, take the /gr/ sound that appears in "granites" and "groined." The heavy alliteration in the poem gives it a very literary feeling—this poem is not trying to imitate every day, conversational speech. Even as the poem resists literary tradition, roughing up its heroic couplets, it also wants to feel sophisticated.
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Lines 4-8
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. -
Lines 9-10
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell. -
Lines 11-13
With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan. -
Lines 14-17
“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”
“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,
The hopelessness.
Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; -
Lines 17-21
I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here. -
Lines 22-25
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled. -
Lines 26-29
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress. -
Lines 30-33
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled. -
Lines 34-36
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint. -
Lines 37-39
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were. -
Lines 40-44
“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now. . . .”
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“Strange Meeting” Symbols
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The Tunnel
“Strange Meeting” is set in a deep, dark tunnel where dead soldiers gather after their souls have left the battlefield. As the speaker eventually realizes, this tunnel is not a literal place: instead, it's “Hell.” In the Christian tradition, Hell is a place that God creates to punish and torment sinners; the punishment is carried out by a crew of fallen angels. However, the “Hell” that the speaker describes in “Strange Meeting” doesn’t share much with the usual Christian images.
In the speaker’s account, God didn’t create the “tunnel”: instead, “titanic wars” cut it through the bedrock. And there are no demons administering punishment. Instead of being tortured, the speaker simply has a conversation with another soldier—an enemy soldier that he, himself, killed the previous day in battle. If there is punishment in the poem, this is it: the speaker has to confront the consequences of his actions, has to recognize the humanity he shares with the enemy soldier.
In this sense, the tunnel is best understood as a complex, ambiguous symbol. On the one hand, it is a symbol for the consequences of human violence: it shows how war damages the landscape and the people who fight it, cutting them off from their fellow human beings. On the other hand, it is also a place of reconciliation: where the soldiers have a chance to confront each other, to share their frustrations over the war, and to recognize their shared humanity. In this sense, it is also a symbol of reconciliation—albeit a very weak one. Only in "Hell" itself, after cataclysmic violence, does the reconciliation the poem describes become possible. This, in turn, reflects just how horrific war must be—if the only space for any semblance of peace is in Hell.
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Blood
In lines 12-13, the speaker describes the “profound dull tunnel” into which he has escaped as a protected, sheltered space. He notes, for instance, that down in the tunnel he can’t hear the pounding artillery of the war going on above: “no guns thumped.” And he also notes that “no blood reached there from the upper ground.” In this line, the blood serves as a symbol for the violence of the war above.
This is a traditional symbol. For instance, people often refer to violence as “shedding blood.” Because the “blood” in the line is symbolic, it changes the meaning of the line. The speaker is not saying—or not only saying—that none of the blood from the battlefield seeps through the earth and into the tunnel. He is also saying that the tunnel itself is a space free from the violence that defines the battle going on above. Although the tunnel is “Hell,” it is also a place of peace: it serves as a respite and relief from the violence that brought the speaker and his enemy there.
The symbol returns in line 34, where the enemy soldier imagines repairing the damage done by war. He begins by portraying that violence, describing "chariot-wheels" "clogged" with "much blood." The chariot wheels here symbolize the machines and equipment with which wars are fought; the "blood" that clogs them up symbolizes the violence and killing that they're used for. In both cases, then, blood symbolizes the violence of war.
The symbol appears one last time in the poem, in line 39, where the enemy soldier claims, "Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were." This doesn't mean that these men's heads are literally bleeding. Instead, the blood here is a symbol of their mental anguish—of the psychological trauma that war inflicts on those who fight.
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Citadels
The enemy soldier notes that the “world” is “retreating” in line 32, and in line 33, he specifies where they are heading: “into vain citadels that are not walled.” Citadels are fortified towns or large castles. The line contains a paradox, since a citadel without walls isn't much of a citadel. Indeed, the enemy soldier admits as much, calling the citadels “vain”—that is, useless. War is pushing the world backwards into these useless citadels—in other words, people are fighting for nothing.
More broadly—since the citadels are fortress, since they symbolize defensive architecture—the enemy’s soldier’s point may be the world’s retreat, its slide into war and violence, is itself indefensible. In that case, the "citadels" symbolize the arguments that people make to support the war—the patriotic poems and songs that drum up support for it.
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Chariot-Wheels
In the final lines of the enemy soldier’s long speech, he drifts into a kind of visionary fantasy. He imagines that he will intervene and repair the damage that war has caused. He begins this fantasy in lines 34-5 by imagining that he will “wash” the “blood” from the “chariot-wheels.” A chariot is an ancient military technology: a carriage pulled by horses, which allowed its driver to use a bow and arrow or a spear to attack other soldiers. It is thus somewhat out of place in the poem. Though the poem never specifies what war the speaker and his enemy fought in, it seems significantly more modern, with artillery pounding the battlefields. The “chariot-wheels” thus aren’t literal instruments of war; instead, they symbolize the machines and tools that people use to make war. (And the “blood” that clogs their wheels symbolizes the violence and destruction that such instruments cause.) To wash the chariot's wheels, as the enemy soldier wants to do, is thus to release these instruments of war, to free them from their association with violence.
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Sweet Wells/Water
As the enemy soldier describes his desire to wash the “blood” from “chariot-wheels,” he tells the reader how he will wash them: he will use “truths that lie to deep for taint,” truths that he draws up from “sweet wells.” In other words, the enemy soldier is not going to literally wash the wheels (and they’re not literal wheels, anyway). Instead, he is going to use truth itself to clear away the legacy of violence.
Those truths come from “sweet wells.” Like almost everything in the enemy soldier’s fantasy, these wells are not literal: rather they symbolize the objectivity and power of truth. The enemy soldier imagines that truth comes from some place deep in the earth; that it is life-giving (like the water that wells usually hold); that it is without “taint”—that it hasn’t been poisoned or compromised. In other words, the "sweet wells" tell the reader a lot about how the enemy soldier imagines or understands truth itself. For the enemy soldier, truth is not relative; it does not change or decay. Rather, it is something that endures—and that is so powerful it can erase the effects of violence.
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“Strange Meeting” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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End-Stopped Line
“Strange Meeting” is a strongly end-stopped poem. For one thing, this means that enjambment feels like a disturbance when it pops up, a break in the poem’s order. It also creates a sense of deliberate pacing. Most of its lines are self-contained. This isn't a poem that rushes along with lines falling all over each other; instead, it seems controlled, slow, and methodical—which notably contrasts with the violence of its subject matter.
Perhaps this reflects the (rather ironic) peace and quiet that the speaker finds in Hell, where none of the above violence and chaos can reach. There is no need to rush headlong into battle here, and the poem's many end-stops thus support the dead soldier's calm, collected authority. The "truth" he has to tell the world isn't something derived from a fit of passion or rage, but rather an objective realization he has come to after leaving the violence of the battlefield behind.
More subtly, the poem’s heavy use on end-stop as part of its resistance to its own form. To understand why, it's important to note that “Strange Meeting” is written in heroic couplets—a form that uses rhyming lines of iambic pentameter. Poems written in heroic couplets often fall into a regular pattern of enjambment and end-stop: the first line of each couplet is enjambed, the second end-stopped. The first rhyme is incomplete, unfinished; the second rhyme closes off a sentence or grammatical unit.
But in “Strange Meeting” this isn't what happens. Instead, each line is often its own sentence, as in lines 11-12:
With a thousand fears that vision’s face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground.Although the lines sort of rhyme with each other (in fact, they are pararhymes), they are each discrete, separate units: complete sentences that end with an end-stop. Where a rhyme would usually connect two things or ideas, here it emphasizes the separation between the two lines: though he has escaped from the battle, the enemy soldier’s face remains “grained”: he has not recovered. The strong feeling of separation that the end-stopped lines create underlines the poem’s argument: that violence isolates and divides people who might otherwise be friends.
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Enjambment
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Caesura
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Simile
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Parallelism
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Diacope
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Apostrophe
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Personification
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Synecdoche
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Consonance
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Allusion
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Metaphor
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"Strange Meeting" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Profound
- Dull
- Granites
- Groined
- Encumbered
- Fast
- Bestirred
- Probed
- Piteous
- Distressful
- Sullen
- Vision
- Grained
- Upper ground
- Flues
- Running
- Richlier
- Distilled
- Spoiled
- Tigress
- Progress
- Citadels
- Cess
- Parried
- Loath
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Deep.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Strange Meeting”
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Form
“Strange Meeting” is broken up into four stanzas of wildly varying lengths. The longest of these is the third, which, not coincidentally, contains the dead soldier's monologue. This speech is the thematic heart of the poem—it's where the poem makes its strongest condemnations of war—and it's fitting that this is the longest stanza of the bunch.
This is also interesting on a visual level, since the final stanza, which reveals the poem's major twist, looks so short in comparison to what comes directly above it. It's as though the revelation that the speaker killed this soldier is simply tacked on to the soldier's speech as an afterthought. This "truth" about the dead soldier's identity isn't nearly as important to the dead soldier as is the "truth" about how horrible war is. Indeed, the brevity of the final stanza suggests how little it matters what side someone is on in war. The reality is, everybody loses.
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Meter
“Strange Meeting” is written in iambic pentameter, meaning there are five poetic feet per line, each of which has an unstressed-stressed syllable rhythm. For example, take the poem’s first line:
It seemed | that out | of batt- | le I | escaped
The poem is relatively steady in its use of iambic pentameter, reflecting the relative calm of Hell in comparison to the battlefield. That said, there are some lines that break this meter. For example, line 29 opens with a trochee, a metrical foot that follows a stressed-unstressed rhythm—just the opposite of an iambic rhythm:
None will | break ranks,
This trochee is then followed by a spondee (stressed-stressed). Altogether, this underscores the authority of the line—the soldier is certain that no one will speak up to end the meaningless violence.
Trochees also open lines 30 and 31, where they again add a sense of emphasis and authority to the soldier's self-assessment:
Courage
WisdomAnother trochee appears in line 42:
Yester-
The line breaks from the expected meter of the poem, but in doing so, it registers the force of this moment—not coincidentally, the moment when the dead soldier tells the speaker that the speaker is the one who killed him. These are just a few examples, reflecting how the poem uses slight variations in sound to support its thematic arguments.
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Rhyme Scheme
“Strange Meeting” is written in heroic couplets—a form in which two lines of iambic pentameter rhyme with each other. This form could be extended indefinitely:
AABBCCDDEE
...and so on.
Very often, the rhymes in heroic couplets ring out clearly, but “Strange Meeting” almost never uses perfect rhyme. Instead, the poem is a kind of murderer’s row of unusual, awkward, and failed rhymes. Most prominent among these is slant rhyme, which more often than not falls into the specific category of pararhyme—meaning words share the same consonant sounds in the same order: for example, "hall" and "Hell" in lines 9-10, and "years" and "yours" in lines 15-16. Sometimes these rhymes even extends across stanzas, as with "groined" and "grown" in lines 3 and 4. At one point, the poem offers three pararhymes in a row, instead of the two one expects in a poem written in couplets: in lines 19-21, which rhyme "hair," "hour," and "here."
This is surprising and perhaps disorienting, since usually poems in heroic couplets have very good rhymes. The 18th-century poet, Alexander Pope, for instance, loved heroic couplet—and prided himself on the strong, full rhymes he managed produce in each couplet. For many readers, such rhymes create a sense of certainty and confidence.
As such, the awkward, broken, failed rhymes of “Strange Meeting” defy the expectations of this form. Instead of certainty, one finds doubt; instead of confidence, anguish and pain; instead of polish and control, damage and devastation.
In other words, the poem’s bad rhymes echo its general disillusionment with war—and with the poetry that celebrates war. And they register the damage and violence of war: the poem itself seems as wounded and devastated as the soldiers it describes.
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“Strange Meeting” Speaker
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The speaker of “Strange Meeting” is a dead soldier. In "Hell" he meets an enemy whom he killed the previous day. Since the poet, Wilfred Owen, fought in World War I—and wrote the poem while he was serving on the Western Front—most readers assume that the speaker is also a soldier in World War I.
Some of the poem’s details support this assumption. For instance, World War I was very destructive of the physical terrain in which it was fought; the speaker begins by describing how the war has cut a deep tunnel into the bedrock of the battlefield, a tunnel that leads straight to Hell. And the speaker’s description of “guns thump[ing]” recalls the artillery fire that marked the battlefields during World War I—and accounted for much of the damage the war did to the terrain where it was fought.
However, the poem is careful not to give a lot of specific information about the speaker. By the end of the poem, the reader doesn’t know what country the speaker fights for, or even whether he really fights in World War I. (Since all soldiers were men at the time the poem was written, it is reasonable to assume that the speaker is male.) The poem resists being tied too closely to a specific historical context. As a result, the poem feels broad. It is not simply a meditation on the horrors of World War I, but a reflection on the horrors of war in general.
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“Strange Meeting” Setting
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“Strange Meeting” is set in a deep, dark tunnel, which the speaker describes in line 2 as "profound" and "dull." The tunnel cuts into the bedrock of the earth—or, rather, it was cut by “titanic wars.” In other words, the tunnel is not a natural phenomenon; instead, human beings created it through seemingly endless wars.
Later, the speaker announces that this tunnel is in fact “Hell” itself. In this sense, the poem can also be thought of as taking place in the after-life; after all, both the speaker and the enemy soldier who he talks to are dead. And they aren't the only ones: the tunnel is occupied by other "encumbered sleepers"—that is, other dead people. The poem never tells the reader how many, exactly, but it feels like the tunnel is full of them, the dead from all the wars in history gathered together under the earth.
In the Christian tradition, Hell is usually understood to be a place of punishment and torment—a place that God Himself created. But in “Strange Meeting,” God doesn’t seem to have much to do with Hell. The poem doesn’t make any other references to Christian theology, and God never appears in the poem to judge the dead soldiers. (Instead, they judge each other). In "Strange Meeting," Hell is a creation and consequence of human violence. The setting thus supports the poem’s broader argument: that war creates nothing but horror and pain.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Strange Meeting”
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Literary Context
“Strange Meeting” was written in 1918, while Wilfred Owen was a soldier fighting on the Western Front during World War I. Owen is now recognized as a leading voice among a group of young English poets who fought in the war and wrote about their experiences. Among the most famous of these poets, besides Owen himself, are Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and Isaac Rosenberg. These poets revolutionized the way that people wrote about war. Instead of writing patriotic verse, glorifying heroism, they criticized the war itself—and violence more generally.
More broadly, the 1910s were an exciting time for poets as writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot rejected literary traditions like meter and rhyme and started to experiment with radical new forms. This was called "modernism," a literary movement that emerged in response to the rapid urbanization and industrialization of European society in the second half of the 19th century. Poets wanted to find a way to express those societal transformations in their work—and the tried and true traditions of poetry just weren’t up to the task.
As society transformed, so did warfare—becoming more brutal, violent, and total. And though "Strange Meeting" might not be as radical in terms of form as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" or "In a Station of the Metro," Owen's poem does break with poetic tradition in trying to find new ways to represent these new forms of warfare. For instance, the poem flirts with the traditional form of heroic couplets: it’s written in iambic pentameter and it rhymes. But its rhymes are consistently off: Owen uses slant rhyme and pararhyme in place of the perfect rhyme expected from a formal poem. In this sense, the poem both uses a poetic tradition and (very subtly) calls it into question, suggesting that such old-fashioned forms aren't sufficient when writing about the horrifying reality of war.
Historical Context
Wilfred Owen wrote “Strange Meeting” in 1918, while he was serving in the British Army during World War I. Owen did not survive the war: he was killed in battle in 1918.
World War I began in 1914, following the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serbian nationalists in Sarajevo. Because the great European powers had signed treaties pledging to defend each other, this local event in a far corner of Europe quickly plunged the continent into total war.
WWI followed an extended period of peace, stretching back to the 1870s. Indeed, the peace had lasted so long that many people felt that war was a thing of the past, that human society had progressed beyond needing to fight wars in order to settle its differences. Despite this faith in human progress, when the war broke out, it was greeted with celebration in many quarters of European society. People were eager to prove themselves in battle; they treated it as an occasion for heroic displays. Many patriotic poems were composed to celebrate the troops riding into battle.
However, the war quickly ground to a bloody, horrifying stalemate. Neither side was able to gain the upper hand. In eastern France the Germans on one side and the English and French on the other settled into trenches separated by several hundred yards of no-man’s land. Hundreds of thousands of lives were sacrificed in bloody battles—battles which resulted in one side or the other advancing only a few inches. The brutality of the war—accelerated by new chemical and conventional weapons—was unprecedented in human history, as were the number of casualties.
For many of the soldiers, the war quickly began to feel pointless. Its barbarism caused many to question the values that they had believed in at the start of the war—namely, patriotism and progress. Owen’s poem reflects these tensions: it does not treat war as heroic, but rather horrifying. And the enemy soldier is well aware that his society is moving away from, not toward, progress.
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More “Strange Meeting” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poetry of World War I — A list of poems written about and during World War I, broken down by year, from the Poetry Foundation.
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World War I — A detailed timeline for the First World War, put together by the BBC.
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"Strange Meeting" Read Aloud — Alex Jennings reads Owen's poem in its entirety.
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Benjamin Britten's "Strange Meeting" — A performance of the British composer Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem," which includes a musical adaptation of Owen's "Strange Meeting."
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The Life of Wilfred Owen — A detailed biography of Owen from the Poetry Foundation.
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The Rear Guard — Siegfreid Sasoon's poem, "The Rear Guard," which influenced Owen's "Strange Meeting."
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Wilfred Owen
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