Greater Love

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1918

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Mirroring of Love and Violence

Although love and violence are often conceived of as opposites in popular culture, the speaker in “Greater Love” creates a powerful link between them by exploring the uncomfortable ways in which they mirror one another. The speaker tends to focus upon the physical experiences of love and violence, as manifested in the human body. The speaker creates this mirroring effect through juxtaposing the physical attributes and experiences associated with a beloved lady in traditional love poetry with that of soldiers in war.

The clichés of traditional love poetry are alluded to in the “Red lips” (Line 1) of the poem’s opening line and the alluring “eyes” of a beloved (Line 5), as well as the “slender attitude” (Line 7) and “dear voice” (Line 15) that is “soft” (Line 13)—all common ways of describing the attractions of a female love interest in English poetry.

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The speaker then contrasts these romantic clichés with the ugly realities of violent wartime deaths, which feature qualities that gruesomely realize what the clichés only describe in the abstract. What is even more “red” (Line 1) than imaginary lips are the horrific blood-stained stones (Line 2) marked by the wounded “English dead” (Line 2). Eyes are not left metaphorically and hyperbolically “blinded” (Line 6) by dazzling beauty, but in complete actuality by some kind of weapon that injures indiscriminately and leaves those without wounds with the emotional scars of survivor's guilt. The physical intimacy enjoyed by lovers is grotesquely mirrored by the ironic mention of the “fierce love” (Line 11) soldiers experience as they fight one another, until this deadly proximity “cramps them in death’s extreme decrepitude” (Line 12), pushing their corpses together through mass death instead of through a consensual sexual encounter. The poem ends by urging the reader to “Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not” (Line 24, italics mine), culminating in the permanent termination of all love and intimacy: Since the soldiers are now dead, they can never be loved or touched by anyone else ever again.

The Physicality of Death

While earlier epic or narrative war poetry centered upon acts of heroism and bravery, Owen is notable for describing the realities of wartime injury and death in stark, unsentimental terms that emphasize the human cost of war. There is nothing valiant or romantic about the way in which soldiers die in Owen’s poem. They are left face-down on the ground with their corpses kissing “stones” (Line 2), their limbs are viciously mutilated by weaponry (“knife-skewed”, Line 8), their mouth are filled with dirt (“Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed”, (Line 18)), and their hearts are left swollen and fatally damaged through gunshot wounds: “hearts made great with shot” (Line 20). In constantly presenting the reader with this graphic imagery of injury and death, the poem’s speaker de-idealizes war and rejects the traditional imagery of chivalric machismo associated with wartime feats. This thematic preoccupation with the ugly reality of armed conflict reveals the speaker’s determination to present the truth, in all its gruesome detail, instead of writing in accordance with the traditional jingoistic wartime clichés.

The Tragedy of Wartime Losses

The speaker’s focus upon the injured and dead soldiers throughout the poem speaks to another key theme in “Greater Love”: While the soldiers presumably died out of “love” for their country and each other, their loss is presented as tragic, not heroically fulfilling some goal of masculinity. There is no hint anywhere in the poem that their deaths were meaningful or necessary, or that the war they are fighting in is a worthy cause in and of itself. Instead, the speaker returns again and again to the idea that these wartime losses are merely the obliteration of a generation of fine young men. He credits the soldiers with “love pure” (Line 4), suggesting that they are young and naïve, and points to a situation that brutally harms and discards them all. The soldiers enlisted partly because of the traditional stereotypes of soldierly prowess that they've grown up hearing, but were then forced to fight and die “through flame and hail” (Line 23) on a hellish battlefield landscape that had nothing to do with honor. They perished in a part of the world that seems to have lost all morality and reason: “where God seems not to care” (Line 10). In this way, the speaker presents the war as a useless and morally bankrupt endeavor that massacred a generation of well-intentioned, but cruelly misled, young men.