Greater Love

The poem’s speaker uses apostrophe—directly addressing something or someone not literally present within the poem itself—for dramatic effect. There are two instances of direct address in the poem: “Love” (Line 5), and “Heart” (Line 19), both of which enable the speaker to create an imagined dialogue with these abstract concepts. In directly addressing Love itself and its most prominent symbol, the heart, which is commonly figured as the seat of human emotion, the poem’s speaker challenges many of the clichés associated with the experience of love and the literary traditions surrounding it. It is also significant that although the speaker is mostly concerned with the experiences of war and violence, he never chooses to directly apostrophize war itself—he instead continues speaking only to Love, while still constantly comparing violence to romance. These acts of apostrophe towards romantic symbols heightens the poem’s thematic focus on the uncomfortable links between love and violence, while also underlining the irony at the center of the speaker’s point of view.

Throughout “Greater Love” runs a streak of bitter irony, centered upon two interlinked ideas. The first idea is that experiences of love and violence sometimes mirror one another in strange and unsettling ways (see Themes), even though it is more common to conceive of them as opposites. The second idea is that while people tend to unthinkingly idealize—and even romanticize—war and violence as exemplars of masculine bravery, the reality is actually ugly and tragic (see Themes). The speaker’s constant comparisons of dead or seriously injured soldiers to lovers and the experience of romantic intimacy highlight this grotesque, ironic gap between how people choose to represent war in traditional celebratory verses and other forms and how war actually affects its victims in real life.