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... Wilfred Owen wrote both from a soldier’s perspective amidst the bloodshed of the Great War and, consequentially, both deal with the very physical and emotional conditions of death within this context. They are composed in a manner that is mournful and daringly explicit where transcribing the death and anguish created by war. ... For while ‘The Show’ must be read lunging at you like a wild dog, rank with feral passion and eager to provoke; brutally explicit and intent on stripping the realities of war down to the ugliest and barest of truths, ‘Greater Love’ is, in contrast, measured, restrained and lamenting, appearing to uncharacteristically uphold the patriotism and military propaganda of the day that preached the greatest glory was to be met in offering up one’s life for one’s country. ...
A good method to illuminate the softer qualities of ‘Greater Love’ is to contrast it to the sharp bitterness of ‘The Show’ (soldier’s slang meaning literally ‘the battle’), a disturbing, graphic account of death and decay set upon a landscape of war. Owen takes his reader along with his disembodied spirit and ‘Death’ to where one will bear witness to hellish scenes of crawling soldiers that resemble insects and worms, and dead ones filling the craterous shell-holes. ... It chronologically recounts line-by-line the bizarre, dream-like events in an unnatural and harsh pattern of non-rhyming words like Death and dearth, uncoiled and killed, spines and mire. ... This conflicts conspicuously with the idea being represented in ‘Greater Love’, that the death in war does have significance, a significance that is attached to the greater good. ... ” The answer that I come up with begins with a personification in each poem of two qualities, death in ‘The Show’ and physical beauty in ‘Greater Love’.
Approximate Word count = 1453
Approximate Pages = 5.8
(250 words per page double spaced)
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