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“Flanders Fields”
Acrylic on canvas 67x50cm |
Sometimes, I let my students watch BBC World so as to hear other English speaking voices and recently they have noted that the newscasters are all wearing poppies in their button holes and wonder why. Apart from the fact that there is an American military Cemetery in Belgium called “Flandersfields” where 368 soldiers lie, I explained, there is also a poem “In Flanders Fields where poppies grow…” which is the opening line of a poem by the Canadian war poet John McCrae who was a soldier-physician in the 1st World War and in his second verse of the poem wrote the following lines which remain memorable:
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.
However, as a child at school, I was taught the poems of Robert Brooke and these particular lines have always remained with me:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
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