In Flanders Fields
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army


In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
the torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
we shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.


My Great Uncle

At the local grocery store last week, the VFW was handing out Buddy Poppies. I asked the young checker and sacker if they knew what the poppies meant. They didn't have a clue. But they listened politely, and seemed genuinely interested in the story. I told them to google this poem when they got home. I hope they did.

My mother (born 1919) remembered reciting "In Flanders Fields" each Armistice Day in her little school in Somerville.

I taught this poem in senior English for many years (along with all the anti-war poems by Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, etc.)

I assume we all know this, but just to say it, the conceit used in many of the WWI poems about the poppies was that these ubiquitous flowers were red because they were nourished on the blood of the fallen. For example, Isaac Rosenberg's "Break of Day in the Trenches":

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies,
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.

What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver -what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in men's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust.


An excellent book that analyzes the war from a cultural perspective is Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. (Fussell was a front-line infantry lieutenant in WWII, and wrote a couple of books about that.)

One of his major points is that the famous anti-war poetry from WWI (almost always written by combatants who did not survive, Sassoon being an exception) was essentially rediscovered and "invented" as a genre during the anti-Vietnam War protests of the 60s. During the war itself, patriotic poetry such as the one in the OP and "If I should die, think only this of me,/That there's some corner of a foreign field/That is forever England" helped give meaning and nobility to the incredible suffering and carnage.

If you are ever near Kansas City, Kansas, you MUST visit the National WWI Museum.

You enter on a glass bridge. Below you is a field of poppies.



Stop on the bridge and meditate. Each poppy below you stands for 1,000 deaths in WWI.

I had no idea that museum existed.

In a similar vein (and we may have discussed it on this forum; can't remember) in 2014 an English artist did an installation of 888,000 ceramic red poppies at the Tower of London. (One for each dead British and colonial soldier.) Very moving:

http://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-29935592

That was amazing, I remember it when it came out. The museum in KC is beyond amazing. Huge, tons of artifacts. Schedule at least 3-4 hours for it.

Thank you, yes, if I get up that way, I certainly will.