Love just isn't enough

This poem is focused around romantic love destroyed by warfare and how love just isn’t enough. The first line “Red lips are not so red As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.” Memories of the girl he left behind are just simply not enough to forget the bloodshed of the war, or get a soldier through the war. At this point we aren’t sure where the soldier is if its during the war or after the war and the soldiers home, but we understand that he’s been changed by the bloodshed, and regardless of if he’s home recovering or still in the trenches, his love in his past life no longer matters very much. It won’t keep him safe in the trenches or if he is home the girl he loves wont understand what he’s been through. Looking at the title of the poem and the comparison of the lips to the blood of the soldier, it seems like the narrator is choosing the war over the girl. The way the blood is redder than the lips, it almost seems like the war is the “hotter” one. When talking about a woman in seductive manner red lips evoke seductive connotations not really profound romantic love connotations, this kind of undermines the love discussed. The mix of lust imagery with battle imagery relates to the thirst to be the heroic warrior that many young men had when they volunteered for war. The sarcastic and ironic juxtaposition of the lips and the blood suggests that this idea was completely stupid as the men were slaughtered. I think this poem intends to undermine both the “love” that’s supposed to get soldiers through war and war recovery, but also the desire to go to war.

The stanzas of the poem all start by discussing the girls lips, attitude, voice and heart, and shows how they have been undermined by a soldiers injuries and war experience. I think as we progress through we enter increasing phases of attraction. The lips show beauty and seduction, which I mentioned, prior. I wasn’t exactly sure what was meant by attitude I think it referred to posture and maybe her body, it might show confidence and poise that would seem attractive, and its something you would notice about some one after you notice their beauty. After is the voice, after seeing the pretty girl who walks confidently, a man would talk to the girl and increase his attraction to her and gets to know her. After that the heart, which signifies love and passion, shows that the girl loves the boy back and there is mutual attraction. At each level the love grows but at each stanza it is undermined with a physical injury, showing how extensively the war caused damage and love lost. At the last line “Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not” it is implied that the soldier are dead because cannot be touched, they cannot be with their lovers let alone be given a proper burial. I’ve also thought about looking at this poem through the perspective of the girl, who is losing a man to war, as if the war was the “other woman.” In the poem the guy would sort of be breaking up with her, and he would just be explaining that he just had a “greater love” for war and he showed that dedication through his death, that he prefers “limbs knife-skewed” to her “slender attitude”. This comparison of the war to another woman seems very childish and laughable, simply seems like nothing more than a bad break up, very mundane compared to war, it’s a sarcastic portrayal of what war was like and implies how loved ones really just didn’t get it.