11/11/2019
"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."
These familiar lines were part of a much longer poem, “For the Fallen” by Laurence Binyon. He wrote the poem while sitting on a cliff-top at Pentire Point in Cornwall – a plaque now marks the spot – in mid-September 1914, a few weeks after the outbreak of the First World War; soon after the retreat from Mons and the Battle of Le Cateau.
Laurence said that the four lines, so familiar to us all and known as “Binyon’s Lines”, came to him first.
In 1915, despite being too old, at 46, to enlist in the armed forces, Laurence Binyon volunteered at a British hospital for French soldiers, Hôpital Temporaire d'Arc-en-Barrois, Haute-Marne, France, working briefly as a hospital orderly. He returned in the summer of 1916 and took care of soldiers taken in from the Verdun battlefield. He wrote about his experiences in For Dauntless France (1918) and his poems, "Fetching the Wounded" and "The Distant Guns", were inspired by his hospital service in Arc-en-Barrois.
Laurence was an English poet, dramatist and art scholar, who was short-listed to be the Poet Laureate, he went on to be the Professor of Poetry at Harvard University.
Laurence died on 10 March 1943, aged 73 years.
To the Fallen:
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.
Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.
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.
But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.
Museum devoted to the history of Glasgow and Ayrshire's local regiment and its people.
