Discuss Owen’s use of the para-rhyme in “Strange Meeting” and show how it impacts the poem.

Discuss Owen’s use of the para-rhyme in “Strange Meeting” and show how it impacts the poem.

We have pararhyme when the final syllable in two lines of a poem not only ends with the same consonant but begins with the same consonant, even though the vowel sounds in the two syllables are not the same. Pararhyme - the word was coined by the poet Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) - is sometimes called partial rhyme or imperfect rhyme. It can be distinguished from half-rhyme. We have half-rhyme when the final syllable in two lines of poetry ends with the same consonant but the vowel sounds in these syllables and the consonants preceding the vowel sounds are different. The pairs of words mad/bed, peal/maul, hate/pot, and game/home are all examples of half-rhyme. 

"Strange Meeting" (1918) is a poem by Wilfred Owen, a war poet who used pararhyme in his writing. Here is a part of the poem that shows pararhyme:

Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared

With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,

By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

The pararhyme scheme of Strange Meeting has a twofold effect on the reader

• It emphasises the seriousness of what is being said without the distraction of perfect rhymes which can sometimes trivialise the verse by their predictability
• The pararhymes jolt us with their discords. They sound ‘wrong’ because we expect the soothing regularity of true rhymes, and when these are absent we hear a tension in the poetry.

In certain couplets the first pararhyme prepares us for the second, such as ‘groined’ and ‘groaned’ in lines three and four. The first is an unusual, unexpected word but has an onomatopoeic quality to it. It sounds very like ‘groaned’. Owen achieves a similar effect with the neutral ‘hall’ anticipating the sinister ‘hell’ in lines nine and ten.

‘Moan’ and ‘mourn’ which end lines fourteen and fifteen have not only a similar auditory quality but also qualify each other. The ‘moan’ is the sound of mourning. The alliteration as in ‘groined’ and ‘groaned’ enhances the onomatopoeia. Notice that, of the twenty two couplets, fourteen have alliterative pararhymes.

Lines nineteen to twenty one have the shared ‘r’ sound of ‘hair’, ‘hour’ and ‘here’ creating a ‘triplet’. ‘Hair’ and ‘here’ match, as do the other pararhymes with the first and last sounds repeating, but the aspirate aitch does not match in ‘hour’ which is a softer, more drawn out sound suggesting the running of time, almost like a sigh. The short, hard-ended ‘hair’ and ‘here’ suggest an immediacy, almost a sense of being ‘here and gone’, which reflects the fleeting beauty of the ‘braided hair’ line nineteen..................................................................................................................................................

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