In Flanders Fields Blog Post - Yu Hin

“War is as dirty a business as the world has ever seen”

~John Steinbeck

By: Yu Hin 

An inconvenient truth

War is an ugly thing, and it is gruesome and bloody.  The lives lost are countless, and we wouldn’t know how terrible it is unless we’ve experienced it.  Poet John McCrae, a lieutenant colonel in the Canadian army which fought in World war one wrote this poem after witnessing the death of his best friend on the front lines.  He wrote this poem to warn those about war, the ugly side of war, and how we should avoid war.

Going deeper into the Poem

The poem is structured very cleverly.  The poem is presented in iambic tetrameter. In a line there are four pairs of syllables.  In each pair, the first syllable is stressed, while the second syllable is unstressed.  An example of this would be "In Flanders Fields the poppies blow." This creates a flow within the poem, and the rhythm could be kept going along with the enjambment that McCrae had used.

The main symbols that the poet mentions in the poem are poppies, torch, and the larks.  Poppies represent the war dead, described by the poet as the blood of the dead soldiers, which grew into red flowers that inspired others.  The torch symbolizes the duty that the dead soldiers pass on, and the lark is interpreted as people who carry on life amid conflict and turmoil, especially the perseverance that they show, as seen in "The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below."

Conclusion:

The poem is a really dark poem, at the same time serving as an epitaph for his loved friend, and also as a warning to the world. Those who buried in the Flanders fields were once young and energetic, with hopes of surviving the war. War eventually turned them down, and stranded them in a meadow far away from home.

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,

His orders come from far away no more,

They come from here and there and you and me,

And brothers can't you see,

This is not the way we put the end to war.