25/04/2017
ORIGIN:
LEST WE FORGET: Binyon’s Ode of Remembrance
On an autumn day in 1914 Laurence Binyon sat on a cliff in North Cornwall, somewhere between Pentire Point and the Rump. It was less than seven weeks after the outbreak of war, but British casualties were mounting. Long lists of the dead and wounded were appearing in British newspapers. With the British Expeditionary Force in retreat from Mons, promises of a speedy end to war were fading fast.
Against this backdrop Binyon, then Assistant Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, sat to compose a poem that Rudyard Kipling would one day praise as “the most beautiful expression of sorrow in the English language”.
“For the Fallen”, as Binyon called his poem, was published in The Times on 21 September 1914. “The poem grew in stature as the war progressed”, Binyon’s biographer John Hatcher observed, “accommodating itself to the scale of the nation’s grief”.
Nearly a century on, Binyon’s poem endures as a dignified and solemn expression of loss. The fourth stanza - lifted to prominence as “The Ode of Remembrance” - is engraved on cenotaphs, war memorials and headstones in war cemeteries throughout the English-speaking world. Recited at Remembrance services in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the poem serves as a secular prayer:
These lines, situated at the heart of the poem, lay out an argument for consolation in which the dead are immortalised in the memory of the living.
Binyon died on 10 March 1943, and his ashes were scattered on the grounds of St Mary’s Church in Aldworth. His name is commemorated on a stone plaque in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey, alongside 15 fellow poets of the Great War. Wilfred Owen - who died in action at age 25, exactly one week before the signing of the Armistice - provided the inscription: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”
To learn more click here:
http://theconversation.com/lest-we-forget-binyons-ode-of-remembrance-13642