Greater Love

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1918

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Violence

Violence is one of the most persistent motifs in “Greater Love”. Soldiers collapsing upon the ground create “stained stones” (Line 2) marked by their blood, while their eyes are “blinded” (Line 6) by presumably either a weapon or an attack of chemical weapons, such as mustard gas (see Contextual Analysis). Their limbs are “knife-skewed” (Line 8), leaving them “rolling and rolling” (Line 9) in the dirt from their injuries, their hearts are large and swollen “with shot” (Line 20), and in death and illness their faces and bodies are rendered “paler” (Line 22) than a beloved lady’s white hand. This persistent imagery of maimed bodies, suffering, and pain creates an atmosphere of unremitting anguish throughout the poem, as the speaker presents indiscriminate butchery as the defining feature of wartime experience.

Death

Coupled with the relentless violence in the poem is another motif, death, which the speaker acknowledges as the fate awaiting many of the soldiers he describes. Deceased soldiers appear in the second line of the poem—“the stained stones kissed by the English dead” (Line 2)—and set the tone for the rest of the stanzas, in which the speaker describes how brutally soldiers are mutilated and killed. Bodies end up squeezed together, “in death’s extreme decrepitude” (Line 12), and soldiers are forever silenced when “earth has stopped [e.g. filled] their piteous mouths” (Line 18). The poem’s closing line ends once more with the finality of death, as the speaker tells the reader, “Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not” (Line 24), leaving the reader with one last reminder of death’s permanency and cruelty.

The Heart

The speaker addresses the symbol of the heart directly in the poem’s fourth and final stanza, in a direct address known as an apostrophe (See Literary Devices). The speaker addresses the heart as the most famous symbol of love, with the speaker’s remarks towards the heart tying into the poem’s general theme of comparing love and violence. The speaker also uses this apostrophe to create a contrast between the heart as an abstract representation of love and the real bodily organs belonging to soldiers who die of gunshot wounds: “Heart, you were never hot / Nor large; nor full like hearts made great with shot” (Lines 19-20). This contrast draws attention to the tensions between idealization and reality, in which the way people imagine an abstract idea (such as love or war itself) is set beside the ugly, lived reality of direct experience. It is also a reminder that the heart is not just a symbol of love, but the essential source of life: Once a heart is stopped, the human being dies.