Remembrance Day Thoughts – Poetry and WW1

‘For the Fallen’ is one of the most well-known poems, not only of its author Laurence Binyon, but in fact of all war poetry. Often recited at Remembrance Day services, it seems to strike the right note of solemn dignity, lauding the sacrifices of English soldiers who died in the First World War without being glib about the terror and tragedy of war. The famous fourth stanza is one that Binyon composed first of all, perhaps through some intense poetic vision –

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.

[Source: http://www.greatwar.co.uk/poems/laurence-binyon-for-the-fallen.htm]

About these lines, John Hatcher writes –

“Composed in Cornwall as Binyon sat with Cicely gazing out over the ocean, this most public of quatrains is, like the poem that grew from it, deliberately choric, so densely laminated with allusions that the poet recedes into anonymity, allowing the literature-saturated English language to speak as if of itself. There are the obvious biblical and Shakespearean echoes — Enobarbus’s lines on Cleopatra, for example: ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale’ (Ant Il.ii, 235) — but beneath these lie powerfully echoic cadences, rhythmical structures of loss and consolation seeded deep in the language by the King James Bible.”

[John Hatcher, Laurence Binyon: Poet, Scholar of East and West, pp.194–195]

Laurence Binyon’s achievements as author and art curator are perhaps not quite as well-known as is his poetry. During his career as Keeper of the Prints and Drawings Department at the British Museum, where he collected a large amount of Japanese artworks and wrote authoritatively on Japanese and other Asian art. Despite his keen interest in Asia, his plans to travel across India, China and Japan on behalf of the British Museum were thwarted by the outbreak of the First World War.

Nevertheless, Binyon was profoundly influenced also by Indian art and literature, and by conversations with Indian friends and acquaintances. These included, as a schoolboy, his classmate Manmohan Ghose and his younger brother Aravinda Ghose, later meeting Rabindranath Tagore through Manmohan Ghose, and later he became frieds with the art critic Ananda Coomaraswamy. Working with Kedar Nath Das Gupta, Binyon co-wrote a version of Kālidāsa’s drama ‘Śakuntalā’ for the English stage, which was performed at a Drury Lane theatre in 1919. About this drama and the classical Indian tradition, Binyon wrote –

“We are transported to a world in which men and women are not enclosed and engrossed in their humanity. There is no separation of human life from the life above it and the life below it. Gods, spirits, demons, animals, birds, trees, flowers and streams; these all share in the one living whole.”

[John Hatcher, Laurence Binyon: Poet, Scholar of East and West, pp.194–195]

With this in mind, our thoughts may turn to the remembrance of the dead in the classical Indian context, and especially in the Māhābhārata, where lamentation at the scale of the carnage of war is a prominent theme. This may also be a fitting reflection in view of the contribution of the British Indian Army during the First World War, when over a million Indian soldiers fought on battlefronts in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

At the end of the great war, Vidura consoles Dhṛtarāṣṭra with reflections about death which we might render into the ownmost words of the English language as follows –

“Get up, King! What is [the use] in lying down? Keep hold of yourself by yourself. For such is the end for all beings, Lord of the world. All that comes together falls apart. All that grows up ends by falling down. All that comes together ends by coming apart. And living ends by dying. Death takes away both the bold and fearful at any time, Bhārata, so why should your fighters not fight, Best of Fighters?”

[from Mahābhārata, Strī Parvan; my own translation]

Likewise, Gāndhārī comforts her daughter-in-law Draupadī in similar words –

“Don’t be overcome by sorrow, daughter. See that I too am sore. I think this laying waste to the world, this awful thing, which was driven on by the wending of time, had to happen through its ownmost being.”

[from Mahābhārata, Strī Parvan; my own translation]

The keen power of the English language to speak forth the horror and hopelessness of war is also seen in the work of another English war poet, Wilfrid Owen. His feelings about the war are vividly conveyed in one of his most famous poems, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, which begins as follows –

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

[Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47393/anthem-for-doomed-youth]

Wilfred Owen’s poetry was drawn directly from his experiences on the front line, and mocked the idealism and glorification of war that characterised the early days of the First World War. Indeed, the lines above have added poignancy when we know that he was tragically killed in action just a few days before the armistice was declared.