“Strange Meeting” is one of the most haunting and profound war poems written by Wilfred Owen, the foremost British poet of World War I. Composed in 1918, the poem was published posthumously in 1920 in The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Owen’s close friend and fellow war poet Siegfried Sassoon. Owen was killed in action on 4th November 1918, just one week before the Armistice was declared. His poetry, including “Strange Meeting,” only gained widespread recognition after his death.
Owen’s life and art reveal a striking contrast. Born in 1893 to a modest family, he aspired to be a poet and initially admired the Romantic poets, especially Keats. His early poems were conventional in tone. However, his experience as an officer in the trenches of France shattered his early ideals. The brutal realities of mechanised warfare—mud, gas, shells, the psychological torment—transformed Owen into a poet of witness. Through works like “Dulce et Decorum Est”, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, and “Strange Meeting”, he gave voice to the inhumanity, futility, and waste of war.
The title “Strange Meeting” is loaded with meaning. It refers to an eerie, dream-like encounter in an underworld—perhaps Hell or a symbolic realm beyond death—between the speaker (presumably a British soldier) and the ghost of an enemy combatant he had killed. The “strangeness” lies in several dimensions: the surreal setting; the reversal of expected enmity, as the two soldiers connect on a human level; and the revelation that, beneath their national identities, they shared the same disillusionment, wasted youth, and deep understanding of war’s tragedy.
In this imagined meeting, Owen transcends national boundaries, suggesting that soldiers on both sides are victims of the same senseless conflict. The poem ultimately questions the divisions created by governments and the glorification of war. The powerful final lines—“Let us sleep now…”—express a yearning for rest and peace, not only for the dead but also for a war-ravaged generation.
