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  • Writer's pictureSi Biggs

For the Fallen (Ode to Remembrance)


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. Moved by the opening of the Great War and the already high number of casualties of the British Expeditionary Force, in 1914 Laurence Binyon wrote his For the Fallen, with its Ode of Remembrance (the third and fourth or simply the fourth stanza of the poem).

At the time, he was visiting the cliffs on the north Cornwall coast, either at Polzeath or at Portreath.

The piece was published by The Times newspaper in September, when public feeling was affected by the recent Battle of Marne. Today Binyon's most famous poem, For the Fallen, is often recited at Remembrance Sunday services in the UK; is an integral part of Anzac Dayservices in Australia and New Zealand and of 11 November Remembrance Day services in Canada. The "Ode of Remembrance" has thus been claimed as a tribute to all casualties of war, regardless of nation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Binyon


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