Rereading Owens’s “Strange Meeting” in the light of Indian Poetics

Abstract

Indian theorist Anandavardhana points out that ‘rasadi’, is the life-blood of any poem. In fact, basic emotions like love, pathos, heroism, and diverse passing moods, or changing feeling-tones are the domain of ‘Rasa’. Owen’s  “Strange Meeting” is a dirge or ‘Vilapa-Kavya’ as here the mood of pathos and futility pervades the situation and provides a fitting ‘Vibhava’ or correlative of the ‘sthayi-bhava’ of ‘soka’(pathos) and ‘Karunarasa’ is the final outcome,  what Owen says, “The pity of war, the pity war distilled.” Bharat in his Natyasastra says “atmanubhavanam bhavo vibhavah paradarsanam” meaning what a poet feels in his heart manifests in his art, what Eliot says, ‘emotion’ and ‘art emotion’. Here Owen makes the same thing. Besides, use of ‘gunas’ like ‘samadhi’or poetic personification which according to Dandin is the heart of the matter of all poetry, ‘ madhurya’i.e tenderness and ‘prasada’, i.e. keenness of judgment-- all contribute to make the poem a universal or ‘sadharanikaran’. In this paper an attempt has been made to analyze how the poet has made a journey from personal feeling i.e. ‘svabhava’ to the transmission of the imagined experience of the same feeling in others that is ‘Vibhava’.