Strange Meeting, by Wilfred Owen

The description of war has been given the imagery of hell. The poem “Strange Meeting” by Wilfred Owen was written during the time of war. Wilfred Owen was a British poet that wrote and based his writings on events in World War I. Wilfred Owen was a British Poet that wrote and based on events in World War I. “Strange Meeting” was written in 1918 and then later published after his passing. Majority of his poems was written in a little over a year, from 1917 to 1918, while only five of his poems were published. Wilfred Owen died in action at the age of twenty-five, he died one week before the Armistice, which ended the First World War. Through pararhyme couplet, onomatopoeic words and imagery, Owen describes the similarities of war and hell in order to signify war’s psychological effects on a soldier coming home.

The narrator is a soldier who seemingly has escaped battle, now follows a path into a long, old tunnel by which had granite walls or formations. The soldier is walking and hears groaning of either sleeping soldiers, deep in thought or dead. Owens use many poetic devices such as in line three and four in which he uses pararhyme for groined and groaned. This use of pararhyme has a distinct similarity of consonants by which the second rhyme is lower toned like groaned. Owens uses another pararhyme with hall and hell and with the use of a second tone, which is in a lower pitch than the first. In lines nine and ten, “And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall-/By his dead smile I knew we stood in hell.”(9-10).

By the smile of the dead soldier, the speaker knows he is in hell and that he had died on the battlefield, which was described in line one when the speaker says it “seemed” that out of the battle I escaped. Pararhyme coupl...

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...g was, I re-read it and understood where Owen was reaching to the audience. I enjoyed reading the poem because of a personal connection to it, having had family die in war before.

Bibliography

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Mays, Kelly J. "Section 16." The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. New York: W W Norton &, 2014. 841-42. Print.