By Seth Barrett Tillman
JOHN McCrae’s In Flanders Fields (1915) is iconic. No more need be said. Unfortunately, its meaning has been distorted by what is now the most popular voice and instrumental accompaniment. This new reading of the poem has transformed In Flanders Fields’ meaning. It may be that this metamorphosis was unintentional. Still: recapturing our Western literary heritage will require recovering this poem’s original public meaning.
This is In Flanders Fields, "before" and "after." The key two changes are in red.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
You can find several very fine readings and performances, with and without musical accompaniment, on Youtube. See, e.g., William Bond; Leonard Cohen; Anthony Davies; and, Anthony Hutchcroft. These four readings are stylistically quite different from one another, but they are each faithful to McCrae’s original text. How so? They each read “Scarce heard amid the guns below” as the last line of the first stanza.
There is a new rendition, and it has grown quite popular because its score (for voice and instruments) is simple and beautiful—making it all the more pernicious. This is how In Flanders Fields is now read:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly.
Scarce heard amid the guns below
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up your quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
See the difference? The new reading places “Scarce heard amid the guns below” at the beginning of the second stanza. You can find the post-modern rendition here, in this Ghent University Chorus performance, in this U.S. secondary school’s student rendition, in a 400-year-old English grammar school’s chapel choir, at an ANZAC Day performance in Australia—and in Canadian Remembrance Day ceremonies.
So in what way do these changes affect the poem’s meaning?
In the original text, it is the larks—the natural world—that is “scarce heard” by man “amid the guns below.” The technological terror of modern war and death has separated man from nature, but the natural world continues. The larks remain, even if now beyond Man’s perception. Man’s unnatural separation from the natural world confirms the horror and loneliness of war and death.
As to the second stanza, as originally written, it is the “Dead” who call out to us, the living; they call out to us as if they were actually alive. It is the larks who are distant from us, not our dead, hallowed through sacrifice. Understood this way, In Flanders Fields is the Great War’s Gettysburg Address, although it is only in the third stanza where all this is made clear.
By contrast, the new reading wholly transforms In Flanders Fields’ meaning. We, the living, remain close to the larks. Indeed, it is the larks’ bravery, akin to that of the living and dead who “fought [t]here,” which becomes the focus of the first stanza, as opposed to McCrae’s originally intended and deeply disturbing image of man, both “living and dead,” cut off from the natural world.
More importantly, in the new reading, it is now “the Dead” who we, the living, can “scarce[ly] hear[] amid the guns below.” The Dead’s call to us is now a plaintive one, rather than a compelling one. Indeed, the less we can clearly hear them, the less we believe it is truly they who we are hearing. The effect is to transform the third stanza from a Gettysburg-Address-like call to communal service in the great cause, to a personal prayer or a mere meditation mourning for distant dead, with whom we do not remain in substantial communion. And this inference is supported by the new narration’s changing the original’s “Take up our quarrel with the foe,” a cause shared between the living and the dead, to merely “Take up your quarrel with the foe,” a cause foisted onto the living by the now absent and distant dead. At worst, the new reading transforms a patriotic call for continued resolute “devotion” into a claim for little more than useless retribution. “Useless” in the sense that the dead, who would make these demands on the living, can draw no real benefit or succour in consequence of any future defeat or victory within our mortal reach.
If one were looking for evidence of the decline of our Western literary heritage, one need look no further. It is here.
Seth Barrett Tillman is Associate Professor at the Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology in Ireland / Scoil an Dlí agus na Coireolaíochta Ollscoil Mhá Nuad. Academic title and affiliation for identification purposes only.