In Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand at least, every service of remembrance on or about the eleventh of November , or Anzac Day, is usually concluded with a reading of four lines from a poem by Laurence Binyon called “For the Fallen.”
They shall not grow 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.
"For the Fallen", Binyon’s Ode of Remembrance.
The complete poem was printed in The Times on 21st September 1914. To critics such as Alan Bold the poem is an expression of the patriotism of establishment poets who had already signed a joint letter of support for the War three days before. Instead of these “technically antiquated exhibits of ...endurability,” Churchill preferred to promote the younger poet, Rupert Brooke, who had published a set of war sonnets including the lines before dying of blood poisoning in Lemnos. In The Times of 26th April 1915, Churchill eulogised these poems. Bold thinks the politician deliberately made Brooke “the official martyr”. Only later were the poems of Wilfred Owen to completely overthrow both public masks and address a more universal audience. Owen’s tenor of realistic pity set the tone for all subsequent war poetry.
Binyon and the Great War
Binyon was forty five when he wrote the Ode. He did not volunteer for the front until two years later when he worked for the Red Cross on the Western Front. When he wrote he had had no experience of the conditions on the trenches, though Brooke himself saw little action. Owen almost saw the war through to the end.
Binyon and the Fallen in War
There is no doubt that Owen is the greater poet. Yet Binyon was to create a very successful career as an academic , especially in the field of Eastern art. His worked was included in the only lasting canon, Philip Larkins’ Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. How come Binyon’s conservative verses have become a pious prayer to the war dead, with its response of “we will remember them” and the virile critique of Owen is less heard, except in the rarefied harmony of Britten’s War Requiem?
Binyon and the Ode of Remembrance
The answer lies in the rituals of remembering. It lies in the terrible silence of serving men and, later, women on what truly happened. To remember the dead and not the experience of war, a different mode of poetry is needed. To lift the spirits of the living, a certain formality is fitting. A deliberate forgetfulness is part of all ritual obsequy, because too much intimacy with the dead counters the conventions of life. Only the living can celebrate the memory of the dead. The intimate experience of war is irrelevant to the recollection of lost friendships. There is a need for epitaphs in public life that is as emotional as the need for intimate involvement. Yet the epitaph suits the public mind better. We need Binyon’s prayer as much as we need the reality of Owen’s intimacy.
Source: The Martial Muse, Alan Bold, Wheaton, 1976
Duncan McGibbon - By contributing writer, Bath (UK) Institute Convenor and Wells Festival Prize-Winner, Duncan McGibbon
