Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae: In Flanders Fields

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.

Hey, guess who's back? I'm returning to 3BPoetryThoughts to finish the last 3 posts I never got around to 1) because poetry's important and 2) I need to warm up for NaNoWriMo in July and although I saw 642 Things to Write About in Urban Outfitters the other day, I was too cheap to buy it.

This, in case you didn't know, is the poem that inspires the Veterans of Foreign Wars to give you red poppies when you donate, and many countries around the world to use red poppies on their various Remembrance/Memorial Days. I first read this poem/made a poppy at Empire Girl's State when I went summer after my junior year, and I now have a red poppy living on my purse after donating to the VFW ladies at the local Farmer's Market on Saturday. They were very pleasant, and said, "Oh look, we've got a brain over here!" when I mentioned I went to RIT (I had my Imagine RIT Volunteer shirt on, which they asked about).

Memorial Day was also this past Monday. Both of my Grandfathers served in the military; on my mother's side her father was a veteran of the Korean War, although I never met him and she barely knew him at all (he died when she was 9) and my paternal grandfather didn't specifically serve in any wars but was a Green Beret Paratrooper and toured as a sharp shooter with the military afterwards. He died, what, five years ago now? Maybe 6. Given my stats with Left 4 Dead 2 I clearly did not inherit any of his sharpshooting ability.

In regards to the poem I guess the overwhelming feeling it emanates is legacy. The people in the poem are the Dead, yet part of them remains 1) in the poppies that have spouted up where they are buried (the author John McCrae had to personally bury one of his best friends shortly before he wrote the poem) 2) their spirit, previously very alive as described in the second stanza and 3) their cause, which their comrades must take up after them. And not to mention John Green again (spoiler alert, I only have two posts after this one, but he's gonna come up again) but An Abundance of Katherines, which Adam is reading now, is partially about whether or not we create something that lasts forever, and The Fault in Our Stars likewise deals with the impact we have after death. Having read both of those and, well, just living, it's obvious that not everyone will make the kind of impact that will be remembered centuries onward. I'm almost done reading Don Quixote at the moment, and part of me wonders if Cervantes actually knew that people would be reading his stories for ages to come, because Cervantes was extremely meta and does mention at numerous points that Don Quixote will live throughout history. An Abundance of Katherines reaches the previous conclusion and decides it's ok, and that living your life beholden to making an impact to be remembered for times to come is not a fulfilling way to live your life. Living life the way you want to, doing what makes you passionate, and positively affecting those around you is the fulfilling way to live your life. If you manage to create something powerful enough to live on after you by doing this, all the better.

That being said, I think those who are put through the perils of war and make the kinds of sacrifices that war requires deserve the kind of legacy this poem resonates. It's rumored that McCrae tried to throw this poem away but his colleagues saved it and made him publish it, and I'm glad they did so. Veterans deserve some way to continue to live on, even if it's through a small red flower. McCrae's simple poem, written probably out of his grief, is a very good memorial not only to the soldiers he fought with in WWI, but all soldiers before and after as well. Once again, poetry's important.

Happy belated Memorial Day everybody.
-Val

Dulce Et Decorum Est ~ Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.


This is another poem that I found thanks to a class, and I am quite thankful for that. Wilfred Owen was a sad story. He spent his early life in school to become a poet, and he met quite a few professionals who enjoyed his poetry. Unfortunately he was in college at just the wrong time to be drafted into WWI. He fought the war while still writing poetry and sending them back to his family, who compiled them into a book for him. He died in the war, one week before the armistice was signed. A large amount of his poetry gives vivid descriptions of the war and of the death and destruction therein. I won't write too much about this poem, as it does a fairly good job speaking for itself. I will say this though, if you can read this, and still feel that war is a good option, you should read it again, and again, and again. Read it so many times that you close your eyes and can see the frothing figure on the cart, writhing in agony, and slowly dying from the inside out. Then tell me war is a good option.

Signing off ~ Sam Zimmerman

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner - Randall Jarrell

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Randall Jarrell - 1945


If anyone who was in AP Literature at NKHS is reading this, I hope you connected this to Catch-22 like I did. For those who haven't read it, Catch-22 features a character who was blown to pieces in the back of a plane (Snowden).

Back to the poem, it took me a while to actually figure out a lot of the double (quadruple?) meaning behind this poem the first time I read it. The four interpretations I got out of it were as follows:

1: Man's mother dies, he enlists in the army, he's in a battle in a plane and gets shot

2: The "mother" is the main part of the plane, and he was forced into the turret where he was shot

3: Mother dies at childbirth and man gets sent to an orphanage. From there his life is completely controlled by the state, where he spends his meaningless life until he dies.

4: The entire poem is about his birth, where "mother's sleep" is conception, "woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters" is the chaos of the real world, and (he might have died in birth, or his birth was his death) he was forced out with a steam hose (a common practice in 1945).

All of these interpretations feature one thing, this man's life was meaningless. He did nothing of importance; knew no-one of importance. No-one cared about him when he died. Even the brevity of the poem suggests the fact that he was unimportant, only worthy of five measly lines. Even through his unimportance however, we still feel sorry for his death. I think that Jarrell was trying to imply that even the most worthless people should be missed and should not be forgotten, although many are.