sexualising it, although it may have elements of both in it. Take, for
example, the fragment, ‘I saw his round mouth’s crimson’, written at the
same time as the defiant ‘Apologia’:
I saw his round mouth’s crimson deepen as it fell
Like a sun, in his last deep hour;
Watched the magnificent recession of farewell,
Clouding, half gleam, half glower,
And a last splendour burn the heavens of his cheek.
And in his eyes
The cold stars lighting, very old and bleak,
In different skies.To be sure, the ending is no celebration: as the ‘different skies’ are in
fact the same skies without light, so his body is the same body but without
life. But the brilliance is in the suggestion of the word ‘indifferent’ within
‘in different’, because as he watches the boy’s eyes change, Owen is
simultaneously half-aware of his own pain at not being responded to, at
the indifference of death. And this half-suggestion wouldn’t be so power-
ful unless Owen had previously been very interested in the boy: the
‘heavens of his cheek’ is more than simply part of the extended metaphor
of sunset, and Owen is not watching the boy’s crimson lips with a merely
painterly eye. The dying boy is a protest, an aesthetic object, and an erotic
one, and part of this poem’s strangeness is that it is all three. Evidently,
Owen is horrified, but he appears to make the boy an aesthetic spectacle, a
beautiful sunset, gleaming and glowering, without evident irony, and this
aesthetics is merged with eroticism. There is undoubtedly ‘pity’ in the fact
that the boy is dying, but if Najarian is right, and pity extends to erotic
interest about the splendour of his cheek or lip colour, then pity must
embrace eros, art and death. He claims that Owen’s message in ‘Hercules
and Antaeus’ is that ‘erotic bonds between men prevent recurring vio-
lence’ ( 25 ), but pity’s connotations of sorrow and suffering in the war
poems would imply that pity’s erotic bonds between men must in fact
occurwithinthe context of violence, which is perhaps a way to approach
Owen’s controversial 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!196 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism