Road to Hell
Uploaded by alekk on Dec 14, 2003
Modern Poetry in English – midterm paper
Teacher: Bocsor Péter
Fall, 2003 Szeged, Hungary
Tóth 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 Owen’s 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 war’s 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 Owen’s beautiful elegy, “Strange Meeting”, we can read the line “I am the enemy you killed, my friend”. This quotation, which appears on Owen’s 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 Owen’s 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...