mark rawlinson
(This is the thing they know and never speak,
ThatEngland one by one had fled to France,
Not many elsewhere now, save under France.)This is not only a richly ironic version of two nations politics: it is a gesture of
dissociationwhichappropriatestheforeignfieldasthetruehome(not‘Cheap
Homes’ for heroes) of English soldiery. This is a general form of the specific escape
in ‘Strange Meeting’, the poem in which Owen attempted to integrate afflatus
(OED: ‘miraculous communication of supernatural knowledge’, ‘the imparting of
an over-mastering impulse’), brotherhood, and violence.
‘Strange Meeting’ is consciously a departure from ‘war poetry’ as a rendition of
experience or traumatic memory. This is a dream vision, a constructed landscape
in which Owen sets in motion a figure derived from the earlier ‘Earth’s wheels run
oiled with blood’. This poem argued that ‘we’ should ‘fall out’ (Sassoon was about
to report to his regiment) and that he and Sassoon should dedicate themselves
instead to poetry:
Wisdom is yours and you have mastery.
Beauty is mine, and I have mystery.^62This brotherhood in verse is transposed in ‘Strange Meeting’ to arapprochement
in ‘Hell’ (the dead man’s ‘dead smile’ is not the mark of muzzle on mouth, as in
‘S.I.W.’, but an anticipation of the secret society of ‘Smile, Smile, Smile’).^63
A key to the poem is the ‘piteous recognition’ of the ‘strange friend’ (a ‘German
conscript’ in draft^64 ), piteous recognition being what Owen has sought both to
provoke and to deny in his audience. Significantly, this is not a recognition of
the violence donetobutbyan individual: the poet extends his hands ‘as if to
bless’ the dreamer whose blows he had vainly parried. Thus the dreamer is the
proximate reason why ‘men will go content with what we spoiled’: namely, what
is unsaid because of the poet’s death. Keith Douglas’s version of this poem,
‘Vergissmeinnicht’, simplifies the scenario: it is the killer who recognizes the corpse
‘almost with content’.^65 The form of ‘Strange Meeting’, by contrast, makes it
possible for the silencing of the poet to be the occasion of reconciliation (in contrast
to the failed touch of the sun in ‘Futility’).^66
However, we would expect the dream vision to end with a waking back to
reality, with a return on the trip (the epistemic content of the vision). The poem is
incomplete in this sense (and editors have urged we regard it as unfinished): ‘Let
(^62) Owen, ‘Earth’s wheels run oiled with blood’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, ii. 514.
(^63) Owen, ‘Strange Meeting’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 148.
(^64) Owen,Complete Poems and Fragments, ii. 307.
(^65) Keith Douglas, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’, inThe Complete Poems, ed. Desmond Graham (London:
Faber, 2000), 118.
(^66) See Santanu Das,Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 159–62.