"Greater Love": Wilfred Owen, Keats, and a Tradition of Desire - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2001 by James Najarian

In the middle section of the poem, Owen describes the miners who have died. The speaker hears the "moans down there / Of boys" and the "men / Writhing for air." With its moaning and writhing, this description of the dying men and boys is sexually charged. Keats uses moan to indicate thwarted or postponed sexual desire: Isabella moans when her brother tells her that Lorenzo has suddenly traveled abroad and moans again at the moment that she picks Lorenzo's decomposing head out of his grave. At the same time, Owen's speaker imagines the dead men's "muscled bodies." Significantly, the closeted Siegfried Sassoon edited the "muscled bodies" out of Owen's draft of the poem (Complete Poems and Fragments 1:138). Clearly Sassoon recognized the homoerotic weight of these lines. More important, the speaker's homoerotic desire enables him to imagine the miners. He imagines the miners first as "muscled bodies." And only after imagining the "muscled bodies" is Owen able to write about the pit disaster. Owen can sympathize with the men because he imagines himself erotically attracted to them. Homoerotic attraction acts as the poem's pivot of sympathy.

At the end of the poem the original speaker retreats entirely and the last two stanzas are in the voice of the miners themselves. The speaker has become so sympathetic that he fades into the miners' united speech. Owen's sexual attraction enables him to write for the dead men. By implication, Owen writes for all those men who are silenced because of their economic position. The men under his command are a good example. Owen's own description of the "motive" for this poem was "How the Future Will Forget the Dead in War" (Graham 23). The ability and the legitimacy to speak for the dead men depend on Owen's recognition of his sexual desire.

The dead men project a future in which the coal they have hewn burns in the hearth while others fall asleep to its warmth and to music. "Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids,/While songs are crooned" derives from the scene in The Eve of St. Agnes in which Porphyro plays his lute to the sleeping Madeline:

Awakening up, he took her hollow lute,--

Tumultuous,--and, in chords that tenderest be,

He play'd an ancient ditty, long since mute,

In Provence call'd, "La belle dame sans mercy":

Close to her ear touching the melody;--

Wherewith disturb'd, she utter'd a soft moan: (Poems 237)

The redeployment of the scene underlines the sexual attraction between the original speaker and the dead miners by placing their own speech within the context of seduction. Once again Owen stations the miners as the objects of desire, as Madeline is the object of Porphyro's desire. The "moan" establishes its Keatsian credentials as an emblem of erotic devotion.

A tradition of desire

Owen not only constructs a homoerotics of sympathy out of his reading of Keats, he also compares his poetics to those of his predecessors. Owen was aware of his sexuality and was supported with friends we might call recognizably gay, as Dominic Hibberd has shown (150-54). ln "Miners," Owen is also scrutinizing a postromantic predecessor's handling of his sexuality. Hibberd and others note the pathetic tone of the last lines and the figuration of the men and boys under the Housmanian word lads. A. E. Housman has been criticized for his overreliance on a vapid term, but his use of the word lad was more than a tic. Housman deployed lad as part of a crucial strategy. He used the word to obscure the object of his desire. Housman wrote most of his untitled poems with specific objects in mind: some he wrote for the death of his brother Robert at sea; some for the early death of Adalbert Jackson, with whom he had a close (perhaps sexual) relationship; and many for his hopeless unrequited love for Moses Jackson (Grave s 74). Yet the objects of Housman's mourning and of his desire are united under the term lads. This term effectively covers up the relationships between Housman and the objects of his affection because it obscures the kind of affection Housman felt in each instance. The generic lad not only protects Housman from social opprobrium--Housman suppressed the poems he thought revealed his love for Moses Jackson--it also equates all these nameless objects of mourning, makes the losses seem a consistent whole, and subsumes them into an extended mood. In short, lad disguises thwarted desire as melancholy. Housman encouraged the depiction of his poetry, which he ostentatiously dismissed as less important than his philological labors, as the groanings of a sad old man. Owen casually exposes Housman's self-deprecatory strategy in "Miners" by showing a way that sympathy with other men may be achieved; homoerotic desire leads him to pity these men and boys. Only at the end of the poem, when Owen stations the miners as an o bject of affection, do they become "lads."