The phrase ‘Greater love’ acts as a bridge between conventional soldierly
sacrifice and Owen’s complex eroticisation of it, so that the rejection of
conventional romance is less a rejection of eros than its transference into an
all-male context. Owen’s Shakespearian pun on ‘kindness’ indicates that
the wooed and wooer are heterosexual, and then inverts the homoerotic
‘shame’ onto that couple (‘shame’ is Douglas’s rhyme-word for the love
that dare not speak its name, of course). Here, desire appears not as a
positive counter to death, but inseparably one with it:
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.Owen’s rejection of ‘your slender attitude’ does not manage to dissoci-
ate itself from an aesthetic and erotic preoccupation with the refined; the
Grecian Urn-derived ‘attitude’ is both, as is ‘exquisite’, another favourite
homophilic word from Pater toDorian Gray.^25 And nor can this mixture
be separated from the soldiers’ death-throes, for it is the ‘fierce love’ that
cramps them, as if love were a bayonet-blade or shrapnel slice. The precise
agony of the combination of grotesque and comradely in ‘hearts made
great with shot’, where swelling with love, being a hero and bursting with
bullets become the same thing, depends on no one strand predominating.
Such a mixture has made many critics shiver, nevertheless, because
although the poem seems to be a reply to Swinburne’s ‘Before the Mirror’
and Wilde’sSalome ́, it is by no means a repudiation of them. On the
contrary, their decadent themes of exquisite pain and erotic wounds are
here simply made real, and such a paradoxical, twin insistence on the
aestheticised-eroticanddeath in battle is what makes this poem neither
straightforward reportage nor sexual game-playing. What would be in bad
taste would be to suggest that any one of the elements in ‘pity’ has
managed to absorb or ground the others; that the aesthetic and erotic
can safely be explained by the pain of the war (which would not do Owen
justice as an experimental, homophile poet); that Owen makes his war
experience only into a aesthetic poem (which would imply a vicious
detachment on Owen’s behalf ), or that it makes the dying soldiers
nothing but participants in Owen’s psychosexual theatre. Adrian Caesar
believes something like the latter when he claims the mixture of pain and
pleasure in war poetry is derived from Swinburne, and in a wider sense
The passions of Wilfred Owen 197