In Flanders Fields by John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

During the early days of the Second Battle of Ypres a young Canadian artillery officer, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was killed on 2^nd May, 1915 in the gun positions near Ypres. An exploding German artillery shell landed near him. He was serving in the same Canadian artillery unit of the Canadian military doctor and artillery commander Major John McCrae.

As the brigade doctor, John McCrae was asked to conduct the burial service for Alexis because the chaplain had been called away somewhere else on duty that evening. It is believed that later that evening, after the burial, John began the draft for his now famous poem “In Flanders Fields”.

Looking at the title, the reader immediately thinks of the mentioned place, the Flanders, one of the three regions of Belgium. If the reader doesn’t know that the poem was written in war time he would expect the poem will deal with peaceful and quite realities, idea also conveyed by the alliteration of the pleasing sound ‘f’ in Flanders Fields. Only reading the poem, the reader will become aware of the oxymoron hidden beyond the title.

The poem is structured in three stanzas: the first one is made up of five lines, the second one of 4 and the third one of 6.

Despite of the peaceful image of the nature displayed in the first line, the poem immediately shifts into a darker atmosphere, towards the theme of death. Between the poppies, many crosses appear. Thanks to the possessive adjective “our”, the reader understands the narrator is a first person narrator, who is telling his story. The opposition between the poppies, metaphor of life, and the crosses, image of death is reinforced by the opposition between the lively flying larks and the guns below.

The image of the guns, instruments of death, connects the first stanza to the second one, that starts with few strong words: "We are the Dead".The pronoun "we", placed in a strong position at the start of the line, refers to those soldiers dead on the Flanders fields, whose crosses raise from the ground near the poppies. The pronoun is repeated in anaphora ate the start of the following line: “We lived”. The anaphora reinforces the contrast between death and life, key words of two opposite semantic fields. As the cycle of the sun, from the sunrise to the sunset, the soldiers followed a too short cycle of life, falling prematurely on the ground of the Flanders fields, where now they lie.

Finally, the third stanza is an invitation to posterity. The poet asks future soldiers to keep on the battle they started; he asks future generations to remember them, their sacrifices and their struggle for peace. Now that they can’t fight anymore, they can only pass over the "torch", that light of hope that enlightens the road towards peace into the darkness of war. Only if memory of them will last in future, the soldiers can rest in peace under the poppies of the Flanders fields.