At 11:00 am on 11 November each year, people from countries around the world pause to commemorate Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the day that the fighting ended in the First World War. Towards the conclusion of the ceremonies, after wreaths have been laid and before the sounding of the Last Post and the minute’s silence, The Ode of Remembrance is read.
Wartime snapshot
The Ode of Remembrance may be the most well-known part of Remembrance Day ceremonies. It is the fourth stanza of the poem For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon, who before the war had been an assistant keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum. The stanza which forms the Ode of Remembrance reads:
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.
The Ode of Remembrance was selected in 1919 to accompany the unveiling of the London Cenotaph and soon passed into common use across the British Commonwealth. In Australia it is recited on Anzac Day and Remembrance Day.
Written just a few weeks after the war began, For the Fallen anticipated much about the war on the Western Front – not least the vast numbers of dead and the symbolism that came to be associated with the red poppies which grew in profusion in northern France and Flanders.
For soldiers who fought on the Western Front, the Ode of Remembrance also called to mind two of the most important moments of the day in the trenches – dawn and dusk, the time of the 'standto’. This was the favoured time of attack by armies on both sides and all eyes at sunrise and sunset were focused on the enemy line.
Though it was written more than a century ago, in its remembrance of the dead and its sorrowful evocation of the future they were denied, the Ode of Remembrance remains relevant to the present day.
Sources
- Organising a Commemorative ceremony
- The recitation (including the Ode)
- The Ode
- Words of Remembrance
- Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford University Press, New York and London, 1975
Copyright
Department of Veterans' Affairs
