Red Lips Are Not So Red Comments

This reads a little like a wild and bitter parody of an Elizabethan love lyric. It certainly has more than a little of the metaphysical poets' love of contradiction. It's perhaps his most anti-feminist poem (some have claimed, with little evidence, that Owen was homosexual) though if he was it was only because in war you are in close proximity only to men and therefore they become your primary interest. The 'pity of war' that Owen spoke of so strongly is very much in evidence here as well as the irony.