ANZAC Day: our Ode of Remembrance

I learned off by heart the Ode of Remembrance in primary school in the early 1950s and can still remember the words now. But I had no idea who the poet was, so I am citing the ABC News in this post

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.

This is one stanza of the Ode of Remembrance which is recited at Anzac Day dawn services across Australia and New Zealand and engraved on war memorials and cenotaphs in both nations.

Ode of Remembrance

Dawn service

Anzac Day

25th April 2016

The Ode, though, was not the work of a local but comes from a poem by Englishman Laurence Binyon (1869–1943). Born in Lancashire to a Quaker family, young Laurence started working for the Department of Printed Books of the British Museum and their Department of Prints and Drawings, while writing his own work at night.

Binyon himself did not belong to the same generation as other well-known war poets such as Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke. When the Great War broke out in 1914, 45 year old Binyon was too old to enlist, so he volunteered as an ambulance driver and hospital orderly in France instead. 

Less than seven weeks after the outbreak of war, Binyon became very emotional about the already high number of casualties of the British Expedit­ion­ary Force - long lists of the dead and wounded were appearing in British newspapers.  Binyon said he wrote the poem For the Fallen after the surviving British and French soldiers retreated from Mons, during the Battle of the Marne, in September 1914. A so-called victory for the French and Allies against the Germans, the battle had actually cost tens of thousands of Allied lives. And promises of a speedy end to war were fading fast.

Binyon wrote the poem as he was visiting the cliffs on the north Cornwall coast, at Polzeath or at Portreath; at each of which places there is a plaque commemorating the event. He started with the stanza 'They shall grow not old' and this dictated the rhythmical movement of the whole poem.

The piece was published in London by The Times newspaper in September, when public feeling was also affected by the recent Battle of Marne. After the poem appeared in The Times in London on the 21st September 1914, it quickly acquired popular currency in the Antipodes and was reprinted by many Australian newspapers, sometimes in shorter versions, throughout the war.

The phrase 'Lest We Forget', which is usually uttered after the Ode, is not by Binyon but was penned by his fellow poet and contemporary Rudyard Kipling.

When Binyon died in 1943, his name was commemorated on a stone plaque in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey, alongside 15 fellow poets of the Great War.

Today is Anzac Day, the most solemn day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand. In every dawn ceremony in every city and country town, Binyon’s poem/secular prayer will be read.