Changes Made to the Draft of Strange Meeting

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Recommended: Themes of war poetry

Changes Made to the Draft of Strange Meeting

Reality in warfare and the painful truths that accompany war are skillfully presented in

Wilfred Owen's war poem "Strange Meeting." Owen's poem is more powerful thanks to

revisions the poet made as he struggled to understand the devastating effects of war, both

emotionally and socially. "Strange Meeting" underwent changes during its composition that

signify changes in Owen's understanding of warfare and human interactions. As he states in a

draft of a preface to a book of poems, "My subject is War and the pity of War. The Poetry is in

the pity" (Ellmann and O'Clair 542). Throughout the development of this poem, one can see

Owen's concept of this pity change from a personal tragedy to a more universal waste. Owen

made several important changes to his poem "Strange Meeting" that enabled this universal pity

to be more clearly presented. He made the scene of the poem less dream-like and more like an

actual encounter, he eliminated references to the identity of the enemy, and through this, the

universality of his poem, the pity of war, is more plainly and powerfully conveyed.

The original version of "Strange Meeting" portrays the moment captured in the poem as

a sort of dream sequence. Several changes were made to the poem to make the setting more

plausible and realistic. The first line was altered from "It seems that from my dugout I escaped"

to "It seems that out of the battle I escaped" (Owen 541). This change is not a minor one. It is

one of the most significant cues about the location and nature of the action within the poem

given to the reader. Owen's...

... middle of paper ...

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pity, these two soldiers did not desire to die, and yet soldiers do die, they all contribute to each

other's death, they all bleed. They are all impacted forever by the hell of war. The "Foreheads

of men have bled where no wounds were" (Owen 542). There is no escaping the destruction and

loss, the pity of war, which is the same devastation for all men.

Works Cited

Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair, ed. The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 2nd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton

and Co., 1988.

Owen, Wilfred. "Strange Meeting." 1920. Ellamman and O'Clair 541-2.

"The Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive." Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature.

p. 1: http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/jtap/images/mss/bl/ms43720/20f3a.jpg

p. 2: http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/jtap/images/mss/bl/ms43720/20f4a.jpg.

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