Poem of the Day: ‘For the Fallen’

Casualties among the British Expeditionary Forces in the early months of World War I quickly mounted toward extermination level. For those English left at home to read the news, the headlines were shattering.

Imperial War Museum via Wikimedia Commons
'Reliefs at Dawn,' detail, by Christopher R. W. Nevinson. Imperial War Museum via Wikimedia Commons

Though often listed among the poets of World War I, Laurence Binyon (1869–1943) was roughly twenty years older than the soldier generation that included Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, and Rupert Brooke. Too old for active service, he served several stints as a medical worker, in both France and England, seeing firsthand both the human and the cultural carnage of the war, the latter of which he documented in a sonnet, “Ypres.”  

Whether or not it’s true that Kaiser Wilhelm II had issued, in August of 1914, an explicit order “to exterminate the treacherous English,” casualties among the British Expeditionary Forces in the early months of the war quickly mounted toward extermination level. For those English left at home to read the news, the headlines were shattering. Visiting Cornwall in that first terrible year, while he remained untouched by the war’s visceral reality but troubled by its rumors, Binyon wrote “For the Fallen,” his famous elegy for England’s dead.  

This poem, whose loose pentameter lines resolve into tetrameter at the end of each quatrain, recommends itself in every way as the perfect anthem. It speaks in eloquent generalities: the England which collectively mourns, the anonymous they who have marched into battle and never returned, who will therefore “never grow old.” It is easier, year after year, on Remembrance Day, to consider how the stars “are known to the Night,” than to consider a particular face in a particular photograph on a particular mantel, a face frozen in its particular uniformed youth, while time goes on without it, and the particular people who knew that face, far more intimately than the night can know the stars, grow old and pass on, remembering it.  

Of course, as the poem points out, the stars endure. One reason why the poem endures to be recited and sung in settings like Elgar’s is that its imagery, in all its sweeping faceless vastness, endures as well, and lends itself to remembering what, in fact, nobody alive remembers anymore.  

For the Fallen 
by Laurence Binyon 

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children, 
England mourns for her dead across the sea. 
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit, 
Fallen in the cause of the free. 
 
Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal  
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres, 
There is music in the midst of desolation 
And a glory that shines upon our tears. 
 
They went with songs to the battle, they were young, 
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow. 
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted; 
They fell with their faces to the foe. 
 
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:  
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. 
At the going down of the sun and in the morning 
We will remember them. 
 
They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;  
They sit no more at familiar tables of home; 
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time; 
They sleep beyond England’s foam. 
 
But where our desires are and our hopes profound,  
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight, 
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known 
As the stars are known to the Night; 
 
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,  
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain; 
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,  
To the end, to the end, they remain. 

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul. 


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