The Poetry of Pity
The bitter irony that results from any armed conflict is that regardless which side is victorious, everyone loses. The losses run deep, encompassing not only the waste of lives and resources, but also the death of the hopes and dreams that can never come true. Even deeper is the loss of “the undone years,” the friendships that might have formed and the children who might have been born.
Both “The Man He Killed” by Thomas Hardy and “Strange Meeting” by Wilfred Owen poignantly articulate the pity of war. Each poem begins from a place of bitter irony: that of a soldier holding conversation with an enemy soldier whom he has just killed. In Iife, they fought and killed one another at the behest of their government and ideology; in death, they meet as friends. Their enmity against one another is as futile as the war that created this enmity, and therein lies the pity of war.
Donald Davies’ commentary introduces Hardy’s poetry: “If Hardy is an ironist, pity often gets the last word. The irony is inescapable in the first few lines of “The Man He Killed:”
Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
If only we had not been at the wrong place at the wrong time, the speaker is saying, if we had met over a friendly drink in an hospitable inn instead of on the battlefield, we would have made fast friends and enjoyed one another’s society. Instead, the speaker goes on to say, “I shot him dead because— Because he was my foe,” as though trying in a bewildered way to make sense out of senseless killing. The speaker muses that the man he killed on the battlefield is in the same situation as himself, having enlisted in the army as a way to find work. The speaker is forced by war to fight and kill his neighbor whom he would much rather “treat if met where any bar is/or help to half a crown.” Pity clearly has the last word.
The poetic form is at least as significant as Hardy’s word choices. Although a master of sophisticated forms of poetry, Hardy chose the ballad stanza, a form used throughout the history of poetry to express social injustices in language accessible enough for uneducated people to understand. The short but succinct lines, the simple meter, the basic rhyme scheme of the ballad stanza provide the perfect form for the young, uneducated, bewildered voice of the poem’s speaker.
Wilfred Owen introduces his own work by explaining, “The poetry is in the pity.” The theme of Owen’s war poetry is the pity and futility of war. Yet his poem, “Strange Meeting,” begins with the bitterly ironic situation similar to the one described in “The Man He Killed.” The difference is that “Strange Meeting” describes two soldiers who not only could have been friends had they met under different circumstances, but who became friends upon meeting in Hell. Their dialogue is an elegy to the pity of war and for the lost generation.
‘Strange friend,’ I said, ‘here is no cause to mourn.’
‘None,’ said that other, ‘save for the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope was yours,
Was my life also.
The stab of irony, sharper than the bayonet charge that took the second soldier’s life, is that although fighting on opposite sides of the conflict, these two men shared in common hopes for happiness in this world, enjoyment of beauty, and the laughter and tears that life is made of. They speak of “the truth untold,/ the pity of war, the pity war distilled.” The greatest pity of all, the soldier is saying, is that the people left alive after the conflict is over will never know the full extent of the horror of warfare and why nations must never again choose war as a solution to international difficulties.
Again, the poetic form is at least as important as the language itself. It is significant that Hardy’s poem was written before the onset of WWI, whilst Owen’s poem was written in the last year of that conflict. The sweeping changes that four years of hellish warfare had wrought in the world are reflected in the changes in the poetic form. At first glance, “Strange Meeting” appears to be written in iambic pentameter, suggesting Shakespeare’s blank verse, which would be as familiar to Owen as his own heartbeat. Closer scrutiny reveals, not iambic feet, but echoes of that common meter. The breaking away from the traditional forms suggests that a new form is needed to describe the unfamiliar territory of the pity and futility of modern warfare.
In contrast to Hardy’s scrupulously rhymes ballad stanzas, Owen chooses slant rhymes, or words with similar sounds such as “moan/mourn,” “years/yours,” and “untold/distilled.” The slant rhyme adds to the sense of disorientation in unfamiliar territory.
Also in contrast to Hardy’s ballad stanzas, Owen writes his poem in verse paragraphs. This form provides pauses for transitions. For example, in the last two paragraphs, the white space separates the second speaker’s description of the pity of war from the final ironic twist— that he, the “strange friend” made in death, is the soldier that the first speaker killed in combat.
In life, enemies; in death, the strange friends sleep the sleep of death together.
Works Cited
Davie, Donald. Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. New York, 1972, p 33
Hardy, Thomas. The Man He Killed. Anthology of Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry, Ed. Keith Tuma, Oxford
Owen, Wilfred. Strange Meeting. Anthology of Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry, Ed. Keith Tuma, Oxford