Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen
Quick answer: Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen, analysed: the descent into a dream hell, the enemy who becomes a friend, and the pararhyme technique that changed poetry.
A soldier escapes battle down some profound dull tunnel and realises, gradually, that he is in hell. There he meets a stranger whose face is marked with a thousand fears, who tells him of the hopes they shared, the truth about war that will now go untold, and finally, in one of the most devastating recognitions in poetry, who he is: the enemy the speaker killed the day before. The dead man's last words are an invitation to sleep.
Owen left Strange Meeting unfinished at his death in November 1918; it was published in 1920, and Sassoon placed it first in the collected poems, calling it Owen's passport to immortality. T. S. Eliot called it one of the most moving pieces of verse inspired by the war.
What the poem says
The opening is a descent narrative: out of battle, down a tunnel scooped through ancient granites, among encumbered sleepers. One springs up with piteous recognition in his fixed eyes, lifting his hands as if to bless, and by his dead smile the speaker knows they stand in hell. Strangely, no blood reaches there from the ground above; the guns are only a distant thumping.
The dead man then speaks the longest speech in Owen's work. He mourns 'the undone years', the hopelessness of dying with his gift unspent. He had hunted the wildest beauty in the world, and he possessed the truth the world now needs: the pity of war, the pity war distilled. Without his telling, men will go content with what was spoiled, or discontented into more war. He would have poured his spirit without stint, washed the world's wounds with truths too deep for taint. Then the turn that reorganises everything before it: I am the enemy you killed, my friend. He recognised the speaker even in the dark, because he frowned the same way yesterday as he jabbed and killed. He parried, but his hands were loath and cold. The poem ends mid-breath: let us sleep now.
How it works
The poem's most famous invention is its rhyme. Owen writes in couplets, but instead of full rhyme he uses pararhyme, matching consonants while shifting the vowel: escaped with scooped, hall with hell, moan with mourn. Every couplet lands slightly wrong, a bell struck and immediately damped, and that persistent near-miss becomes the sound of a world out of joint. It influenced poets for the rest of the century.
The structure is borrowed from epic, the visit to the underworld, from Homer to Dante, compressed into a dream vision. Owen also runs a long game of delayed recognition: the reader learns the stranger's identity in the same line the speaker does, four lines from the end, which converts everything previously said into something said by the man one killed. The final line's broken, unfinished quality (the poem may literally be unfinished) reads as the only possible ending.
Why it lasts
Strange Meeting lasts because it performs the impossible act war forbids: a conversation between killer and killed. Its compassion crosses the front line without a word of politics, and the phrase at its centre, the pity of war, became the summary of Owen's whole poetics.
It also lasts technically. Pararhyme gave English poetry a new expressive register between rhyme and its absence, unease made audible, and this poem is its showcase. Benjamin Britten set Strange Meeting at the climax of his War Requiem in 1962, sung by a British and a German soldier together, which is perhaps the truest reading it has ever received.
What today's poet can steal
Steal pararhyme. Keep the consonants, change the vowel (stone/stain, field/fooled), and use it wherever full rhyme would sound too resolved for your subject. It is the readiest tool in English for writing grief, guilt or wrongness in couplets.
Steal the delayed identification. Let your speaker converse with a figure whose identity lands late and re-frames the entire poem. And steal the underworld visit: taking a living speaker to speak with the dead remains one of poetry's most durable structures, from Homer to last year's prize winners.
What poets can take from this
- Try pararhyme couplets when full rhyme would sound too settled for your subject.
- Withhold a speaker's identity until it can reorganise the whole poem.
- Borrow the underworld descent to stage impossible conversations.
- Give the dead the longest speech; let the living mostly listen.
- End on an unfinished-sounding line when finish would be false.
- Keep politics out of a reconciliation poem; recognition does the work.
Try it yourself
Write a dream poem in which your speaker meets someone they wronged, in a place outside ordinary time. Reveal the person's identity no earlier than four lines from the end, and write the poem in near-rhyming couplets.
Questions
What happens in Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen?
A soldier escapes battle into a dreamlike hell, where a dead man laments the truths about war he will never tell. The stranger finally reveals he is the enemy soldier the speaker killed the previous day, and invites him to sleep.
What is pararhyme in Strange Meeting?
Pararhyme keeps a word's consonant frame while changing the vowel, as in escaped and scooped. Owen's couplets use it throughout, so each rhyme lands slightly off, creating an atmosphere of unease and wrongness.
What does 'the pity of war' mean?
It is the dead man's phrase for the essential truth poetry must tell about war: not glory or strategy, but shared human suffering. Owen used similar words in the preface planned for his first collection.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.