Wilfred OwenPoet laments war [Archives:2003/629/Culture]

By Dr. Hussein Saleh Alzubairi
For the Yemen Times
Wilfred Owen was one of the greatest names in English war poetry. He was a soldier by Profession. Owen was soon called by the emergency of war when the First World War broke out in 1914.
Owen speaks as a soldier with perfect and certain knowledge of war at grips with the soldier; as a mind, surveying the whole process of wasted spirit, art and blood in all its instant and deeper evils.
Owen has been rightly regarded as an inspired poet. And the stimulus for him is his craving for rectifying the blunder of a world that sank into the swamp of blood, bullets and bombs.
The poem:Strange Meeting is one of the most profoundly imaginative statements of Owen's war experience. The inspiration of the poem is war.
The poet has recorded here his grim experience of the front and his prophetic vision of the effects of war.
Strange Meeting is a fine imaginative piece of Wilfred Owen about the cruel effects of war. The meeting of two soldiers is in hell after their death. One of them is an English soldier, while the other one is a German. The English soldier killed the German only to be killed by somebody else.
It is after their death that the two soldiers meet, and talk about the tragedy of war. The English soldier awakens after his death in the hard region of hell, full of dead bodies. He finds before him another soldier.
That soldier looks pale and worried. The English soldier tries to console him. The other soldier tells him how both of them are the victims of war. Both of them had happiness and hope. But war had ended all.
They could not give out to the world the bitter truth of war. The strange soldier fears that the next generation will never learn from them the cruelty of war. He expresses his eagerness to save mankind from the terrible effect of war.
He tells the English soldier that he is the German soldier whom the latter killed on the other day.
The poem powerfully expresses pity and horror at the incalculable and meaningless slaughter of a promising youth on the field of battle. Owen does not sing of the romance or glory of war. His subject is rather war and the pity of war.
In an eloquent manner he brings out the utter negation of the value of human life in war. Promising youths are all doomed on the battlefield, and Owen graphically describes their unhappy fate. War is a dreadful monster. It is the negation of all that is good and great in humanity.
Owen's poem glaringly displays war with all its brutality and insensibility. The only way to find release from war is peace. In peace lies hope of humanity. Peace alone can save man and his civilization.
Wilfred Owen tells the above and the following to the gravediggers. The dead body of the war poet reveals to the gravediggers the shocking, the great suffering and the destructive coming war. He says that politics and politicians have dirty connotations and do not attract the refined minds.
Owen paints the gloomy and the disgusting pictures of war. He shows how man's conflict between passion and reason made happiness impossible.
The problem which engaged the attention of Owen was that a perfectly efficient technological society freed from all struggles and moral effort would not only be intensely boring but intolerable. In such society man would cease to be human.
The nightmarish vision of war is producing the impression of confusion to the whole humanity.
We are living in a state of continuing crisis. Because of the terrifying effects of the expected war, there is a growing feeling that life is a hopeless, a meaningless affair.
President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, please flashback your mind to the First and the Second World Wars and stop the coming war from breaking out.
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