Today is Remembrance Day in Canada—the holiday Americans call Veteran’s Day. This day commemorated throughout the Commonwealth countries with a moment of silence on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the day the armistice treaty was signed to end the First World War. There are usually poems, songs, readings and other activities to mark this solemn day.
A Canadian tradition is the recitation of the poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ by John McRae. McRae was a Canadian physician who served on the front and was inspired to write the poem by the fields of poppies that grew over the graves of fallen soldiers:
In Flanders fields the poppies grow,
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.
The poppy has become a symbol of remembrance in Canada, and most schoolchildren have the poem memorized by the time they finish primary school.
I was interested to note that when I spent the year in New Zealand—a fellow Commonwealth country—many moons ago for graduate school, they had a different poem for their Remembrance Day services. “For the Fallen’ by Laurence Binyon was their standard. The middle verse was by far the most cited, but I found the final stanza especially beautiful:
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain
I hope my fellow Canadians—and others in the Commonwealth—had a meaningful morning!
Image credit: “Royal British Legion’s Paper Poppy – white background” by Philip Stevens – Own work. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
