The poem ‘Greater Love’ by Wilfred Owen compares love to war. It expresses a deep sentiment of dark pain that is embellished with soft words and the notion of love but never loses its sweet bitterness.
The title ‘Greater Love’ suggests that the cruelty of war is an even stronger feeling than love, which is ironic because one says that love is the most extraordinary feeling you could have. Owen is commenting on the fact that war diminishes ones perception of happiness and turns all ones attention of the one and only important thing in their lives: war. Through his writing it becomes very clear to what extent Owen resents everything that comes with war, which can easily be explained by his tragic biography that includes various war wounds.
The way he portrays this lover of his, he almost mocks the whole notion of being in love. In his third stanza he writes:
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.
The first two lines are soft but cynical, and then his words become darker and darker when he reminds everyone of the dead whose voices won’t ever be dear again because they’ve been put to silence by the arrogant hand of man. The first line states that “Red lips are not so dead as the stained stones kissed by the English dead”, giving a perfect example of the constant irony and mocking in Owen’s words.
Personally I really loved this poem, it’s something different and I could relate to it for once. His words are honest and he doesn’t try and twist things in a million ways to make them look and sound good, it just seems to me like simple perfection, something he wrote in a certain state of mind that pushed him to write his feelings down.
No comments:
Post a Comment