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

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2001 by James Najarian

Not only does Owen derive an eroticized sympathy from Endymion, he also compares the ideal social role of same-sex desire to the erotics of his precursors. In Owen's view, erotic sympathy can correct the misconceptions of reified, self-consciously "poetic" heterosexuality. He formulates this expanded role for same-sex sexuality in his poem "Greater Love":

Red lips are not so red

As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

Kindness of wooed and wooer

Seems shame to their love pure.

O Love, your eyes lose lure

When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!

Your slender attitude

Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,

Rolling and rolling there

Where God seems not to care;

Till the fierce love they bear

Cramps them in death's extreme decrepitude.

Your voice sings not so soft,--

Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft,--

Your dear voice is not dear,

Gentle, and evening clear,

As theirs whom none now hear,

Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.

Heart, you were never hot

Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;

And though your hand be pale,

Paler are all which trail

Your cross through flame and hail:

Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.

(Complete Poems and Fragments 1:166)

In a traditional reading, Owen merely claims that soldierly sacrifice is "greater" than sanctioned notions of affection. Yet the poem offers neither military sacrifice nor mere comradeship. Owen rejects each element of female beauty in favor of the eroticized description of the dying soldiers whom he views. "Your slender attitude / Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed" at once shows off Owen's attraction to the men he praises and distances him from an aesthetic preoccupation with exquisiteness. What kind of love is Owen's "greater" love? The continual rejection of traditional objects of comparison echoes Salome praising the body of Jokanaan in Wilde's Salome: "The roses of the queen of Arabia are not as white as thy body" (72). The praise of the male body and the mere implication of Wilde help to place the poem in its homoerotic context.

Owen is haunted by an incident that occurred at Beaumont Hamel, when he saw one of his men blinded before him: "0 Love, your eyes lose lure / When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!" The men he praises have achieved a "greater love" because they have sacrificed themselves for each other. This devotion is the "fierce love they bear." This extension of Keatsian sympathy has a biblical antecedent. The passage first appears in a letter to his devoutly Evangelical mother:

Christ is literally in no man's land. There men often hear His voice: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life-for a friend.

Is it spoken in English only and French?

I do not believe so.

Thus you see how pure Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism. (Letters 461)

It is a rereading of a passage from the gospel of John:

These things I have spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full. This is my commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for a friend's. (John 15: 11-14, King James Version)