In Flanders Fields Analysis

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.

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To answer this previous post...Unfortunately, too many people think that "the obvious interpretation of the poem's turning point, 'Take up my quarrel with the foe', is to seek vengence against the enemy" ...but if you look at what McCrae himself says in other works that he had done, you'll find this simply is not the case.
McCrae wrote:
"But from a million British graves took birth
A silent voice -- the million spake as one --
“If ye have righted all the wrongs of earth
Lay by the sword! Its work and ours is done.”
John McCrae, Boar War 1899
The "passing of the torch" is McCrae's way of saying that wherever there are injustices we must "take up the quarrel with the foe" ...until the "work is done" and we can "Lay by the sword"
As for this post "why does the poet use blow instead of grow when referring to the poppies in the first line? like what is he trying to establish???!!!"...if you look at what Cyril Allinson said (Allinson was the person McCrae handed the poem to...and the first person to ever read the poem after McCrae finished writing it) Allinson said "The poem was an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used
the word blow in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east
wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact
description of the x

| Posted on 2009-11-15 | by a guest

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While the most obvious interpretation of the poem's turning point, 'Take up my quarrel with the foe', is that the reader is then to seek vengence against the enemy for the deaths they've caused, this also appears to undermine the rest of the poem.
The enemy, too, 'loved and were loved'; killing them will simply result in more bodies. This is not a patriotic message - the foe is war.

| Posted on 2009-11-15 | by a guest

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why does the poet use blow instead of grow when referring to the poppies in the first line? like what is he trying to establish???!!!

| Posted on 2009-11-14 | by a guest

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I read the exact same thing as the first post just on a different website...

| Posted on 2009-11-07 | by a guest

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what is the main subject of the poem? I've been asked to do an oral on it on Tuesday,help!

| Posted on 2009-06-07 | by a guest

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wow thats amazing thanks a heap all that was really useful :) it gave me alot to think about for an essay im writing

| Posted on 2009-06-04 | by a guest

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random, helful ideas....
"row on row" emphasises the number of deaths
"that mark our place" symbolises that their deaths have been glorified and not ignored as there is a "mark" for their sacrifices.

| Posted on 2009-06-01 | by a guest

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thanks for the analysis.
what a great poem, i have chosen to memorize i for a school project. my grandmother, who is 82, still remembers it after learning it in second grade.

| Posted on 2009-05-26 | by a guest

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"In Flanders Fields", probably the most used patriotic poem in World War One appears to be showing the pride and majesty you should have in those who have died in war and uses many techniques to try and persuade men to fight for those who have died. However, if told that Mcrae wrote this and then screwed it up in anger and walked away because of his friend dieing in war, you are able to see how it could be mocking patriotism, bitter and sarcastic, like many of Sassoons poems. Without knowing this fact you are able to see why it is used as a powerful patriotic poem.

| Posted on 2009-05-15 | by a guest

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In Flanders Field is a First World War Poem that was written by John McCrae. The poem has a distinct rhyming sequence to it. There are a use of symbols throughout the poem. Two of the main symbols within this poem would be the Poppy Flower and the Larks. Poppies in Belgium, where this poem was written in, stands for the military dead that sacrificed their lives to help liberate Belgium during the First World War Poppies are present in the actual Flander fields. McCrae's In Flanders Fields remains to this day one of the most memorable war poems ever written. It is a lasting legacy of the terrible battle in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915.
The first symbol that is depicted in this poem would be the poppy flower. The flower represents the dead that have been buried in the ground. Poppies are a bright flower and the tone to the poem is that it is dealing about death on a battlefield. The use of the bright flower is quite ironic in contrast to the bleak and opposite coloring that a battlefield would look like. Also due to the poppies bright red color the flowers could also stand for the bloodshed on the battlefield. The poem is depicting philosophically that life is a great as a flower such as the poppy but once death is encountered your value is only as bright as a gravestone. The Poppy Flower also has associations with the two drugs bring heroin and opium, which happen to be two of the very hard drugs. There might be some correlation to the poem that the poppy was used in the poem due to its relation with drugs. The only relation that I could conclude is that since war on such a large scale and the scene being depicted is so unrealistic that you have to be in a unrealistic state of mind to actually take in what is occurring.
The larks are another symbol within the poem. They stand for the beloved soldiers that kept on fighting hard in the battlefield and never gave up till they were dead. The larks in the sky also like in a sense turn you away to what the poem is initially describing, which is the battle that is taking place on the battlefield below. The 4th line I think directs you towards the sky is that it is saying that in the air if a soldier was to look up they could avoid looking down below to what they may be seeing and experiencing and still realize that they still live on earth where there is peaceful life occurring such as larks being together and singing and flying towards their own home.
In the first stanza, the poem is setting the tone. There is a contrast of bleak yet not gloomy tone. The bleak is stated with the crosses lined row on row, and the lighter tone to the poem is stated with the mentioning of larks singing. The word in line three in the poem was referring to the graves or crosses in Flanders field.
In the second stanza, it is most evident that the speaker in the stanza is the dead. This is known from the very first line of the stanza stating “We are the dead.” The dead are also indicated to have been recently killed or dead soldiers. Since the dead are talking in the second stanza, there is an indication on the meaning of life and death of human existence on the world. For the reference of the Dawn and Dust would stand for the living and the dead how some are alive and then pass over to the dead later on. Or the second meaning that Dawn and Dust could stand for is how the tone of the battlefield is, full of power and emotion in the morning but then to just lie down in the late evening. In the line “Loved and were loved,” and “now we lie,” the dead are explaining to the reader that they had experienced some of the most vital human emotions during their living period. Now for these dead no longer live, they will be unable to experience the emotions again making the dead soldiers live quite sad.
The last stanza’s tone is utterly different from the likes of the first two. It is very bold and powerful as if the speaker was a general talking to his troops. I do believe that this indicates that there is no reference to the dead since there is a remark about “Take up our quarrel with the foe:” . Then there is another symbol that is represented in the last stanza which would be the torch. The symbolic meaning that the torch would bear is that to wither away any thoughts of weakness and vengeance for the fellow dead members of your army. The remaining soldiers on the battlefield have the ability to extinguish those who oppose them and close the seal on those who were killed unwillingly. They are the dead’s last hope in finding vengeance against those who unrightfully took their innocent lives away on the battlefield. The words used in the last stanza are very powerful for it is mainly talking about faith.
Because of these beautiful images and powerful messages, “In Flander’s Fields” endures as a memory of The Great War and a warning against future war.

| Posted on 2009-05-12 | by a guest

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what the hell. this is so confusing! analyse properly please!

| Posted on 2009-05-03 | by a guest

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hello, the first msg from the guest was plagurised by some1

| Posted on 2009-03-30 | by a guest

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“In Flander’s Fields” by John McCrae is the most enduring memory the world has of the “war to end all wars” because of it’s beautiful imagery and its message.
McCrae uses vivid imagery to convey to the reader the sense of death. The first image he uses is also the most famous : the poppies that “blow between the crosses, row on row.” The poppies are used not only because they do really grow in Flander’s fields, but also because their brilliant read colour is representative of blood, and, if the reader knows that the crosses used were white, they are a contrast against the crosses. Their colour, that of blood, is put against white, the colour of innocence, representing that the blood shed was the blood of the innocent. McCrae also provides the image of larks “still bravely singing” above the battle field in order to demonstrate to the world that nature is indifferent to the affairs and suffering of men and also to represent hope that the world can return to normal in the future and singing can be heard once again. He also mentions, however, that these larks are “scarce heard amid the guns below” to demonstrate to the reader that hope and nature are drowned out be war and violence and the good and pure things in life forgotten. Another image McCrae provides is that of the soldiers who had recently died feeling dawn and watching “sunset glow.” He provides this image in order to relate that these soldiers were real people and that they felt peace and enjoyed life. It also shows how their peaceful existence was shattered by war. One of the final images in the poem is that of the torch being thrown form the “falling hands” of dying soldiers to the living. This is a powerful image because the torch is connotative of victory, and the suggestion is that victory is now the responsibility of the living. It also gives the image of a dying request; the soldiers’ last request is that Canadians and other allies “take up [their] quarrel with the foe.”
McCrae also presents two very powerful messages in his poem. The first is that the dead soldiers were real people who “lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow.” They were not abstractions; they were not pawns in some high-stake chess game played on an international stage. They “loved, and were loved.” In other words, they had girlfriends, wives mothers, and other people who were important to them, and they were important to other people because they were husbands, sons, and brothers. The second message McCrae stresses in his poem is that these soldiers have done all they can; not only the responsibility to win the war now fall to the reader, but the reader must now also honour the memory of these fallen men by winning the war. “If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies grow.” Their mission will never be finished if those left to read the poem do not continue it.
Because of these beautiful images and powerful messages, “In Flander’s Fields” endures as a memory of The Great War and a warning against future war.

| Posted on 2009-01-14 | by a guest

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can i have help because im stuck on my essay.i need to use pqa format to write an essay for 25/11/08
please help me!

| Posted on 2008-11-22 | by a guest

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McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" remains to this day one of the most memorable war poems ever written. It is a lasting legacy of the terrible battle in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915. Here is the story of the making of that poem:
Although he had been a doctor for years and had served in the South African War, it was impossible to get used to the suffering, the screams, and the blood here, and Major John McCrae had seen and heard enough in his dressing station to last him a lifetime.
As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, Major McCrae, who had joined the McGill faculty in 1900 after graduating from the University of Toronto, had spent seventeen days treating injured men -- Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans -- in the Ypres salient.
It had been an ordeal that he had hardly thought possible. McCrae later wrote of it:
"I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done."
One death particularly affected McCrae. A young friend and former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915. Lieutenant Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain.
The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the dressing station beside the Canal de l'Yser, just a few hundred yards north of Ypres, McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem. The major was no stranger to writing, having authored several medical texts besides dabbling in poetry.
In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches in that part of Europe, and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook.
A young soldier watched him write it. Cyril Allinson, a twenty-two year old sergeant-major, was delivering mail that day when he spotted McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the sergeant-major stood there quietly. "His face was very tired but calm as we wrote," Allinson recalled. "He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Helmer's grave."
When McCrae finished five minutes later, he took his mail from Allinson and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the young NCO. Allinson was moved by what he read:
"The poem was exactly an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word blow in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene."
In fact, it was very nearly not published. Dissatisfied with it, McCrae tossed the poem away, but a fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to newspapers in England. The Spectator, in London, rejected it, but Punch published it on 8 December 1915.

| Posted on 2008-03-10 | by a guest