Greater Love

The poem opens by alluding to one of the most common tropes of English love poetry—the redness of the beloved’s lips—and immediately juxtaposes it with an image of violent death: “Red lips are not so red / As the stained stones kissed by the English dead” (Lines 1-2). The speaker continues to build upon this jarring contrast between romantic idealization and the ugly reality of war in each of the lines that follow. In Line 3, the “kindness of wooed and wooer” (i.e. the beloved and the one who courts him/her) is derided as mere “shame” next to the “love pure” of the soldiers (Line 4), who are presumably driven to take part in the fighting by a deep patriotic love for their country and a sense of camaraderie for their fellow enlistees.

The speaker uses an apostrophe—a direct address to an absent or abstract person or thing (See Literary Devices)—in Line 5, addressing Love itself: “O Love, your eyes lose lure / When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!” (Lines 5-6). In other words, the sparkling attraction of a beloved’s eyes and even the appeal of Love itself lose their charm when the speaker notices the soldiers who have lost their vision by either traditional arms or chemical weapons on the battlefield, while the speaker remains sighted and plagued with survivor's guilt. The poem's next two stanzas continue the apostrophe, addressing Love as the speaker accuses it of being an inadequate comparison to the realities he has seen.

In the poem’s second stanza, the speaker’s imagery becomes more graphic. He compares the trembling of a lover through excitement or pleasure to the shaking of “limbs knife-skewed” (Line 8) in war, and describes the soldiers “Rolling and rolling there / Where God seems not to care” (Lines 9-10), suggesting that the war has robbed the world of all meaning and morality, with even God—the supreme moral authority—strangely absent from these scenes of mass death and suffering. The speaker talks again of the “fierce love [the soldiers] bear” (Line 11), which could refer to either the “love pure” (Line 4) the soldiers feel for their country and their commitment to one another, or could also be an ironic nod to the passionate hatred the soldiers feel towards their enemies when locked in hand-to-hand combat. Either way, the result of this “fierce love” (Line 11) is tragic: It ultimately “cramps them in death’s extreme decrepitude” (Line 12), suggesting an image of bodies packed tightly together in a mass grave, or perhaps in one of the trenches World War I was infamous for using (see Contextual Analysis)

The third stanza focuses upon the speaker’s sense of irrevocable loss in the face of the soldiers’ deaths. He argues that the “dear voice” (Line 15) of the beloved in love poetry, which although “soft” (Line 13), is actually “not dear" (Line 15) because it cannot compare to the voices of those "whom none now hear” (Line 17). In other words, though a beloved's words might be valuable, there are always more of them where they came from—meanwhile, none of the soldiers can ever speak again, making their no longer available voices much more precious. The reason for the soldiers’ silence is once again made explicit in a graphic image: “Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed” (Line 18). The coughing could be an allusion to mustard gas, a chemical weapon deployed during WWI trench warfare, which killed soldiers by suffocating them if they were not wearing a gas mask for protection.

In the poem’s fourth and final stanza, the speaker uses another apostrophe for dramatic effect: He directly addresses the symbolic heart, the metaphor most prominently associated with romantic love. Yet, once again, the speaker invokes this romantic abstraction only to undermine it through violent juxtaposition with hard reality: “Heart, you were never hot / Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot” (Lines 19-20). In these lines, the speaker contrasts the traditional usage of “heart” as something romantic with the reality of the heart as a bodily organ that has now stopped beating within the bodies of dead soldiers, as gunshots have made their hearts “large” (Line 20) and swollen through fatal wounds.

The speaker ends the final stanza with a reflection upon skin tone. While pale skin is often described as a beautiful feature of a beloved woman in English love poetry, here paleness is a morbid outward sign suffering and death: “And though your [the beloved, or love’s] hand be pale / Paler are all which trail / Your cross through flame and hail” (Lines 21-23). The imagery of “flame and hail” suggests that even soldiers who have not yet died are nevertheless a kind of living dead, pale as ghosts and existing in a landscape marked by hellish phenomena. The speaker concludes the poem by urging the reader to “Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not” (Line 24). This final line brings to an end to intimacy—both the intimacy of romantic love and the brutal intimacy of violence between men on the battlefield. Now that the soldiers have died, they can never experience the touch of another in any form ever again.