Lovely to See NHL in Canada Honouring War Veterans (Poppies)
Nov 12th 2018, 5:05 pm
#16
Assimilated Pauper
Joined: Mar 2005
Location: Ontario
Posts: 40,019
Re: Lovely to See NHL in Canada Honouring War Veterans (Poppies)
It is indeed a beautifully written poem, and when read well it is indeed evocative. Sadly, though, it is too often read aloud extremely badly, as though it's a piece of doggerel with the reader adhering strictly to rhyme and meter rather than to the sense of the words and McCrae's punctuation. As a call-to-arms for generations to come to be prepared to join the fight if necessary, to preserve the freedoms for which McCrae's colleagues were dying, it is powerfully emotive.
Certainly much more so than Laurence Binyon's "For the Fallen" of which the fourth stanza (They shall not grow 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) is used in the British act of commemoration. The rest of that poem is awful.
Certainly much more so than Laurence Binyon's "For the Fallen" of which the fourth stanza (They shall not grow 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) is used in the British act of commemoration. The rest of that poem is awful.
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
And this:
Nov 12th 2018, 6:07 pm
#17
Magnificently Withering
Joined: Jan 2007
Location: Oakville, ON
Posts: 6,891
