Strange Meeting
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
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.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
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.
“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; 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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 …”
The literary precursors of Wilfred Owen’s Strange Meeting (1918) have been widely investigated. Dante and Shelley are two of the most readily identifiable. The contrasted registers seem, interestingly and awkwardly, to conduct their own battle for the poem.
The tunnel in which Owen’s protagonist finds himself in the opening stanza leads him into a groaning dormitory he recognises as hell. The expansive pace and perspective of these opening lines aren’t unworthy of Dante. The imagery – the “groined” tunnel and the hell-hall of sleepers and stalled hope, are thoroughly, physically present, and at the same time, symbolically dense: they seem to evoke the ossified body and mind of war itself. The big, graceless para-rhymes, though hardly Dantean, are magnificently deployed.
Owen’s speaker is not an intentional spiritual pilgrim, but a puzzled young soldier, either dying or dead. His encounter with the soldier from the enemy “side” brings about a beautifully understated reconciliation. “I am the enemy you killed, my friend,” this other soldier says, and his brief explanation is all that’s needed for their truce.
This same soldier speaks at length before revealing his identity. It’s as if he represented the poet’s voice, proclaiming both the vision and the bitter understanding (and foresight?) that the vision can never be fulfilled. His language is pitched high – sometimes too high. Enter the Romantic poets with Shelley.
Owen’s title, and some trace elements of the story, derive from Shelley’s epic romance, The Revolt of Islam. In the relevant passage, the narrator recovers from unconsciousness caused by blood loss. “And one whose spear had pierced me, leaned beside / With quivering lips and humid eyes; and all / Seemed like some brothers on a journey wide / Gone forth, whom now strange meeting did befall / In a strange land, round one whom they might call / Their friend, their chief, their father, for assay / Of peril, which had saved them from the thrall / Of death, now suffering. Thus the vast array / Of those fraternal bands were reconciled that day.”
One of the contributors to a discussion in the journal Connotations argues that the lines beginning “Now men will go content” fail to make sense. Those lines are certainly a shock to the reader’s expectations. The vision of compassionate power – perhaps the power of the poet to tell the truths of war to a world in moral retreat – becomes increasingly messianic. In the last stanza, the earlier, more measured voice returns and is again compelling.
It’s been argued that the poem is unfinished. Owen would surely have preserved the finely, purposefully unfinished last line, but it’s possible he would have made clarifications elsewhere if he’d had time to prepare the poem for publication.
Richly influenced by earlier poets, has Strange Meeting been influential in its turn? Dylan Thomas admired Owen (“[a] poet of all times, all places, and all wars”) and I believe Strange Meeting may bear fruit in the great villanelle, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. Although not a “war poem”, its allegories of vividly disappointed ambition include, for example, “Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight / And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way” – recalling Owen’s lines “I went hunting wild / After the wildest beauty in the world”. The commandment of the second refrain line (“Rage, rage against the dying of the light”) could almost be the reversal of Owen’s “Let us sleep now …” Flawed though it may be, Strange Meeting resonates beyond its maker’s brief life, and one of its resurrections is the flawless poem by Thomas. There are words and visions that never sleep.
