Over the last two years, I have been asked why I chose Wilfred Owen’s line ‘Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not’ as the epigraph to Calderonia; why I am apparently fond of the poem; whether I think Owen is the greatest ‘war poet’.
To be honest, Owen is not my favourite war poet; that would be Georg Trakl, followed by Ivor Gurney. Trakl is a modernist who can produce more disturbing beauty in his war poetry than anyone, and Gurney shares that Hölderlinesque blend of ‘madness’ and music that is necessary to truly shake us in war poetry.
But, yes, I do think Owen is our greatest poet of the First World War. Despite his youth, his ingenuousness in some ways, he was always trying to focus an unwavering and intense light on the ethics of his situation, and he is always experimenting with form, metre, language and rhyme, however Very Late Romantic some of them may seem.
The reason I am so moved by ‘Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not’, the last line of his poem ‘Greater Love’, is that its word-play intertwines two of the most powerful emotions of life and death in the trenches. It encapsulates the worst and the best of our war for national survival. As Santanu Das has shown in his book Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature, camaraderie in the trenches was more tactile than most men had ever before experienced. For all, therefore, either at home or in the trenches, who have lost a loved one at the Front, the loss of literal, feeling touch with them is unbearable — it certainly justifies weeping and weeping (‘you may’) if you ever thought you had to keep a stiff upper lip. But figuratively, ‘touch’ also means ‘approach in value, attain to, equal, rival, compare with’, and this meaning completes the ethical resolution of the poem: strange and even heartrending to say, those (alluded to in the previous stanzas) who know only erotic or Platonic love cannot compare with those who know and practise agapē — who lay down their life for their fellow humans.
Owen’s line is agony, but its lightness and colloquial naturalness (all monosyllables), its almost cruel directness and factualness, its firmness yet gentleness, weave a terrible beauty. It tells an ultimate truth, I believe, about those who went to fight and die, including George Calderon. A tragic truth.
I can’t agree with Santanu Das that the poem is a ‘decadent’ expression of a ‘perverse homoerotic aesthetic’, that it has a ‘powerful undertow of erotic resentment’, or that the last line ‘issues a caveat to women’. I don’t think it can be shown to have a specific gender orientation at all. The last line, however, clearly echoes Christ’s words to Mary Magdalene in the garden after his resurrection (‘Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father’), so that may say something.
Incidentally, compared with Binyon’s line, what a fantastically strong use of the inverted negative: ‘for you may touch them nót.’ Stressed syllable, full stop, end of poem.
Jon Stallworthy once told me of a conversation he had with Tom Boase, the art historian and head of Magdalen while he was researching his book on Owen. Boase was a notoriously prickly individual and seen by undergraduates and fellows as something of a cold fish. Quite out of the blue, according to Stallworthy, he began to talk about life in the trenches (Boase won the MC). Boase told him that in the course of the war, he had developed a close relationship with his batman, a butcher’s boy from Abingdon. One day as they were talking with one another the trench took a direct hit and the butcher’s boy was blown to smithereens. Since then, Boase confided, he had never been able to relate to another human being.
Patrick:
I thank you (on this 4th of November) for your post on Owen yesterday, and for your sensitive and perceptive reading of the last line of “Greater Love”: ‘Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.’ You are dead right to castigate the dubious interpretation offered by Santanu Das, which lifts the line from its moorings on the swell of his own hard-ridden thesis, and leaves it twisted and discoloured like a piece of driftwood. The shift of subject through the four stanzas–from lips, to attitude, to voice, to heart–progressively detaches the poem from any such sexualized reading; I agree with you that (especially by the end), the poem has ‘no specific gender orientation at all.’ I read the poem as hingeing on the contrast between love as ‘kindness’ (‘Kindness of wooed and wooer’)–the famous ‘milk of humankind-ness’ as repunctuated from Macbeth–and the greater love, the ‘fierce love’, of sacrifice: written in blood, not milk.
(Or, thinking of your ongoing Binyon discussion, should I repunctuate for clarity ‘not-milk’?)
Dear Damian, I am deeply grateful to you for these encouraging words, and especially for your independent comment on Santanu Das’s take on the poem. I regret ‘defining’ philosophically the loves Owen is writing about: I think your contrasting pair ‘milk of human kindness’ and ‘greater love written in blood’ is better. And, of course, the paradox is that the sacrificial love is ‘fierce’: it expresses itself not just by self-sacrifice, but by killing…