My subject is war” wrote Wilfred Owen.,” and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.” Owen is different from his contemporaries, Julian Grenfell and Rupert Brooke in that he does not glorify war but treats it rather as a tragic and devastating experience, and treats the victims with compassion. Edmund Blunden labels the Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting”as “the most remote and intimate, tranquil and dynamic, of all Owen’s imaginative statements of war experience.”

In an age of neo-imperialism based on power-politics, Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting” is indeed significant. An analysis of the poem reveals how Owen overwrites the hollow romanticism and chivalry that war has been traditionally associated with it. He foregrounds the calamitous effects of the same. Though the war upheld lofty ideals, it was opposed to progressiveness and humanity in general. The poet transcreates a corporeal world, where the dead soldier comes in contact with a person he had killed the previous day underground. The narrowness of the tunnel signifies the narrowness of the situation. The speaker’s treading over the slumbering soldiers points to the neo-colonialist stance that has countries stepping over humanity and relegating principles to climb up the ladder.

The granite that rubbed against each other in the tunnel echoed the devastation of several titanic wars.