Since Armistice Day will be here shortly (and most of the services, I suppose, will be held today) I thought for my 'Sunday Poem' this week I'd give you these celebrated lines by the English art historian Laurence Binyon, which are much quoted at services of remembrance on this day and appear on many war memorial monuments. They come from a fairly long - and rather plodding - poem called 'For the Fallen', which I don't think is worth quoting in full, although you can find it here if you're interested. Although too old to enlist in the armed forces in the First World War, Binyon had been to the Front as a volunteer ambulanceman.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)
I am always reminded of this, another First War epitaph (which I think I may have quoted on here once before), quite devastating in its simplicity, by A.E. Housman.
Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.
Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is,
And we were young.
A.E. Housman (1859-1936)
3 comments:
Today I always read Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est. And it never fails to bring a tear to my eye.
A bit too angry to be really poignant, that one, I find. I like it, but it tends to produce rage and disgust rather than gentle tearing.
That poem of Clifford Dyment's I posted a couple of Sundays ago is really hard to top for that emotion.
I don't think we should ever think of war without rage or disgust.
It is well that war is so terrible -- lest we should grow too fond of it.
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