Strange Meeting Flashcards
‘Profound dull tunnel’
Talks of the ‘spectral’ spaces so often seen in war.
‘Out of battle I escaped’
‘Escaped’ is a euphemism for death. Death better than suffering the war.
‘Titanic wars’
Superlative.
Great and magnificent, but the death of thousands.
Titanic perhaps also important in signifying the class system.
‘Piteous recognition in fixed eyes’.
Motif of Owen to use eye imagery.
Repetitive recognitions of sight, begging the ‘armchair patriots’ to see more clearly.
Also a window to the soul of those who are struggling?
‘By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell’
Oxymoronic, creates a disturbing tone for the reader.
What does Owen use in his rhymes?
Para-rhymes.
‘Hall’ ‘Hell’
‘mystery’ ‘mastery’.
The contrasting dynamic between the two men.
Could be speaking to himself, how he has been changed by the war.
How could you describe mental cases?
A purge of guilt.
What literary techniques is this poem littered with?
Sibilance and plosive alliteration.
‘A thousand pains that vision’s face was grained’.
Hyperbole of ‘a thousand pains’ and figurative language of a constant expression.
‘Strange friend’
Juxtaposition.
‘The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours’.
Polyptoton.
The two characters are very similar to one another.
‘Whatever hope is yours was my life also; I went hunting wild’.
Consistent sound of ‘w’ becomes hypnotic.
Spell-like, effects of war, manipulation.
‘The pity of war. The pity war distilled’.
Crux of all of Owen’s writings.
‘None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress’.
Militaristic language.
Sense of futility and regression.
‘Much blood had clogged their chariot wheels’.
Reference to Spencer ‘The Faerie Queene’ poem, serving.
Mechanism of war cannot function because so many have died.
