from Christian culture’s assumption that pleasure and guilt are insepar-
able – in other words, that Owen links his love with pain because he felt
guilty about homosexual feelings.^26 But as I have argued above, this
would follow Wilde by turning pain into something else, which Owen
refuses to do. Swinburne’s sadomasochism is always to do with role-
playing, but Owen had no choice but to be himself in the war, however
impossible that self was.
Being himself, in fact, is a much better reason why Owen could not but
link sexuality and pain. Owen loved his men and Owen was leading those
men to their deaths: to love them was to be with them, to be with them as
an officer was to be complicit in killing them. Owen needs no psychosex-
ual guilt to hurt him, because his situation does it for him, as in ‘Arms and
the Boy’, with its bayonet, ‘famishing for flesh’, and ‘bullet-heads / Which
long to nuzzle in the heart of lads’. Paul Fussell maintained that there is a
‘displaced eroticism’ here, but the bullet and the bayonet are exactly the
place where Owen’s eroticism must emerge.^27 Indeed, Owen seems to
have acknowledged the alignment of killing with homosexuality in this
poem, for he classified the poem under the section-title, ‘Protest – the
unnaturalness of weapons’, and as Victorian society’s instinctive response
to homoeroticismandthe keyword of his anti-Wordsworthian aesthetic,
‘unnatural’ was one of Wilde’s favourite terms. In fact, Owen consistently
makes specific parallels between the homophilic situation and the com-
munity of soldiers in which he found himself. The parallel between the
shared unspeakable truth of soldiers and the Half-Moon Street set is
evident in Dorian Gray’s favourite word, ‘curious’, which appears in
‘Smile, Smile, Smile’ as the coded smile of ‘secret men who know their
secret safe’. Similarly, the conscripts in ‘The Send-Off ’ disappear ‘so
secretly, like wrongs hushed-up’; and they may ‘mock what women meant
/ Who gave them flowers’ in more ways than one. In ‘Strange Meeting’
the famous line, ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend’ paraphrases
Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ where ‘each man kills the thing
he loves’. Moreover, the unknown speaker’s ‘piteous’ greeting shadows
Dante’s Brunetto Latini, who was in Hell for sodomy; like ‘curious’,
‘strange’ itself, the poem’s most important word, is also one of Wilde’s
synonyms for the peculiar combination of aesthetic and homosexual
feeling. As the speaker says, ‘I went hunting wild / After the wildest
beauty in the world’. But to argue that these are coded references to a
hidden truth about Owen’s homosexuality would be to miss the point
entirely, for Owen’s sexuality is not therealmeaning of his poems, which
the war then overlaid; rather, it intensifies the conflicts he felt and
198 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism