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Modern Poetry in English midterm paper Teacher: Bocsor Per Fall, 2003 Szeged, Hungary Tth Gabriella The Road to Hell Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen was written probably in the early spring of 1918, the last year of the First World War, only a few months before his death. Owen, - who was born in 1893 got enlisted in 1914. He went fighting in the western front and got wounded. During the time of his hospitalisation, he met Siegfried Sassoon, - a priest for the army, and a famous poet of Owens era who encouraged him to write about the war: the insanity of war. As oppose to modernist war poems, the central theme of earlier works about wars, was the heroism of the individual, the soldier, who devotes his life for the freedom of the nation.
To die for a glorious aim; the independence of the country, and getting rid of the slavery yoke of the people, used to be the subject of war poetry. However, people expected the renewal of the world in the First World War, but soon they experienced the unmerciful nature of the wars machinery. Poets, such as Siegfried Sassoon, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Wilfred Owen, who all underwent the terror of war, tried to represent it, in its actual reality. The loss of basic human properties: life, friends, emotions get into the foreground of poems. In Owens beautiful elegy, Strange Meeting, we can read the line I am the enemy you killed, my friend. This quotation, which appears on Owens memorial, in Shrewsbury Abbey, seems to re-echo throughout the whole poem.
How come that these two, - for the first sight contradictory - concepts: enemy, and friend (in line 40) became somehow identical? In the first three lines of the work, Owen presents the opening picture of the poem, which projects the image of a universal war that sweeps across the earth and destroys everything. The Titanic war, seems to be the essence of all the wars in humans history. In the first line the word seem drives us to a vision-like world, which is going to be the location of the meeting of the spirits of the two dead soldiers. The reoccurring images in Owens poetry: the long dull tunnels, holes and caverns - of which he had feared in the end of his short life are the symbols of Hell. The trenches, which many times became the unsigned common graves for soldiers, are the entrances of the tunnel, through which the souls go down to Hell.
This is where the strange meeting takes place. The first person speaker may be Owen himself, and the other character can be a soldier from the opposing side. In line 7, with piteous recognition in his fixed eyes and also the famous quotation I am the enemy you killed, my friend refers to that they had already shared one cruel moment in their lives before, - the moment of the killing. Owen in this poem does not present himself as a hero, but as a murder, who took away the life of a human being. Although the two men were fighting on the opposite sides, there are things that are common in them. These might make us believe that if they met in some other context: out of war, they could have even been friends.
Both of them are young; in their twenties, and the line which says: whatever hope is yours was my life also (in line 16) is also referring to the shared dreams, hopes and the faith in future, to which war had put an end. They are both standing in Hell, which is known from the dead smile. This place, on the contrary to life, is a relief. There is no cause to moan | Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground | no guns thumped.
These thoughts suggest that even Hell might be a better place to be than the upper ground. Though mourning is the privilege of those, who survived, the two ghosts also have something to lament for: their shard purposes, the undone years, the hopelessness. They lived such a short life, and the hunting for the wildest beauty may not only mean the unfulfilled desires of Owen, himself, but also of all those young soldiers, who had died in wars. Owen, as other modernist poets, kept wars for senseless slaughter, in which people, fighting on the opposite sides, cannot be seen as enemies any longer, but the victims of the mindless fights, which kill hopes. Basically this is the major linking clip between the concepts of enemy and friend.
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