How does the form of "Strange Meeting" by Wilfred Owen relate to its content?

The Poem’ Strange Meeting’ is written as an elegy: traditionally a form used to lament or mourn the dead. Owen is mourning the death of the narrator, curiously a poet who we take to be Owen himself, and a soldier with whom he died in battle who identifies himself:

 I am the enemy you killed, my friend

This use of antithesis and contrast occurs throughout the poem to highlight the opposites of life and death, war and peace, friend and enemy. The effect is to draw attention to the cruel ambiguities and senseless contradictions of war.

Does the form of Owen's "Strange Meeting" relate to its content?

In Owen's poem, form does relate to content. Language choices reflect the hard, harsh content discussing Hell: "I knew that sullen hall, / ... I knew we stood in Hell." This connection between language and content is displayed in vocabulary words like "sullen hall" and "stood in Hell" and also "guns thumped ... flues made moan," "something had been left, / Which must die now," and "the march of this retreating world."

Sound is coupled with vocabulary and amplifies the connection between form and content. Owen uses many words with harsh consonants to produce a harsh sound to accompany a harsh vocabulary and topic, for example, the emphasis on /t/ and /d/ in the first line: "It seemed that out of battle I escaped."

The structure also reflects content by its terseness and minimalistic rhythm. The meter is iambic pentameter (rhythm of iambs (x /) in pentameter, which means continuing for five repetitions called feet, x / x / x / x / x /). The curt meter, especially when coupled with the harsh vocabulary, connects the poem's meter to its content.

The structure also displays this connection between form and content. The stanzas seem to be arranged in no apparent order--some are short, some are long--but this jagged stanza structure emphasizes the jaggedness of the experience of war and the other-worldliness of the poetic speaker's experience down the "profound dull tunnel, long since scooped / Through granites ... ."