The result was some of the most moving poetry written about the poet’s own grief: poems which Stephen Spender said were the kind of poems he’d been waiting his whole life to read. When his parents died, Tony Harrison wrote a series of sonnets about them, innovating with the usual 14-line sonnet form to create a Meredithian 16-line sonnet. The poem builds to a moving conclusion about man’s indifference to others’ suffering. Auden then poignantly considers a painting of Icarus, and the presence of a ship whose occupants seem unconcerned by ‘a boy falling out of the sky’. This poem has the memorable opening statement, ‘ About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters’ Auden muses upon how, in many old Renaissance paintings, while something grand and momentous is taking place – the Nativity, say, or the Crucifixion – there are always people present in the painting who aren’t much bothered about what’s going on. It’s one that Auden used several times, such as when the deep river runs on at the end of his ‘ As I Walked Out One Evening’. Along with ‘never again’ (and ‘no more’), the phrase ‘carrying on’ (or ‘going on’ and other variants) is another one which, if used well at the end of a poem, can carry an emotional punch. The animal suggestion of ‘padding’ rather than walking, as well as the ‘tigerish crouch’ of the departed lover, are trademark Stevie Smith touches, and make this sad, wistful poem all the more affecting. ‘Pad, Pad’ is spoken by someone whose lover sat down and told her he didn’t love her any more. One of our favourite poems by one of the twentieth century’s most eccentric poets. He tells the narrator that they should sleep now and forget the past. This other soldier then reveals to the narrator that he is the enemy soldier whom the narrator killed in battle yesterday. This other man tells the narrator that they both nurtured similar hopes and dreams, but they have both now died, unable to tell the living how piteous and hopeless war really is. There he meets a man whom he identifies as a ‘strange friend’.
The poem is narrated by a soldier who dies in battle and finds himself in Hell. Siegfried Sassoon called ‘Strange Meeting’ Owen’s passport to immortality it’s certainly true that it’s poems like this that helped to make Owen the definitive English poet of the First World War.
No other English poet of the First World War can move readers to tears quite like Wilfred Owen, who himself stated that his aim was to reflect ‘the pity of war’. Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.Īnd by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,-īy his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell … Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
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