Greater Love

“Greater Love,” a lyrical ballad written by Wilfred Owen in either 1917 or 1918, draws upon his wartime experiences as an officer in World War I (1914-1918). The poem creates a startling juxtaposition between the clichés of romantic love and the brutal realities of armed warfare, in which patriotic young men are injured or killed in a conflict that the speaker depicts as meaningless. “Greater Love” embodies many of Owen’s key characteristics as a poet: simple and arresting language, bold imagery, and a deep thematic mistrust of jingoism and the idealizing of war. The poem first appeared in the collection Poems, published in 1920. Owen did not live to see the collection’s publication: He was killed in the line of duty on November 4, 1918, a mere week before the armistice was declared and the war came to an end.

Poet Biography

Although later distinguished by his impressive literary gifts, Wilfred Owen was in many ways a young man typical of his generation. He was born on March 18, 1893, in Shropshire, England, the firstborn son of Tom Owen and Harriet Susan Shaw. While by no means wealthy, his family was of respectable social standing and reasonably comfortable. Owen was a bookish child who developed a deep interest in literature, although only four of his poems would be published during his lifetime.

Owen spent two years working as a teacher in France, from 1913 until 1915, and was living there at the time World War I broke out in July 1914. In 1915, Owen gave up teaching to enlist in the British Army as an officer, and was later sent into action on the Western Front. In 1917 Owen suffered from shellshock (now more commonly known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD) due to his wartime experiences; he underwent medical treatment in the UK for a year, during which his poetry took a darker turn, becoming more mature in style and more critical and bolder in its subject matter. With the encouragement of Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow poet and soldier, Owen wrote openly about the war, depicting it as a brutal, relentlessly unheroic undertaking that brought misery and loss in its wake.

Although his feelings towards the war often ranged from ambivalence to outright disgust, Owen’s conduct as an officer was exemplary. When he returned to active duty on the Western Front in 1918, he won a Military Cross for bravery, and his letters to his mother attest to the deep care and concern he felt for the troops entrusted to his care. Owen was killed in the line of duty on November 4, 1918, one week before WWI came to an end. He was only 25 years old at the time of his death. His first poetry collection, simply entitled Poems, appeared in 1920; it included “Greater Love.”

Since his death, Owen has become famous as one of the leading WWI poets, with his work praised both for its high literary quality and its searing portraits of a “lost generation” sacrificed in the trenches.

Poem Text

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.

Owen, Wilfred. “Greater Love.” 1920. Poets.org.

Summary

“Greater Love” is a lyrical ballad in which the speaker reflects upon the strange and often gruesome ways in which love and violence mirror one another. It opens with the speaker contrasting the red lips of the beloved in traditional love poetry with the stones bloodstained by the wounds of dead soldiers, and continues with a series of stark images adding similarly jarring comparisons upon this juxtaposition: The sparkling eyes of the addressees of love poetry are replaced with the eyes of soldiers blinded by weaponry, a lover’s soft voice is compared to the silenced voices of dead soldiers, and the most famous symbol of love—the heart—is contrasted with the soldiers’ bodily organs that have now ceased to function. The poem ends with the speaker urging the reader to cry over the losses of the soldiers, as war has brought untimely death to them, and no one will ever be able to touch them again.