When Englishman Laurence Binyon wrote "For the Fallen" in 1914, he could not have imagined that his work, or at least a fragment of it, would become a central part of the Anzac Day observance in Australia and New Zealand. He wrote it in response to the vast casualties suffered by the British Expeditionary Force, only recently arrived in France and Belgium. Those casualties would only increase as the Great War passed its expected end-by date of Christmas 1914, culminating in the massacres on the Somme in 1916.

"For the Fallen" is not a great poem in any literary sense (cf. Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon) but the verse extracted from it,

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.

has become an ode of remembrance, not only on Anzac Day, but also on Armistice Day. Technically it includes the verses either side of it, but I have never heard them read in public.

Anzac day is one of the few days that this country takes seriously. But I worry that the deeper lessons are lost in a kind of sentimentality that does not lend itself to study and reflection. If you want to know about the real cost of war and sacrifice, then there are plenty of first-hand accounts such as diaries, letters and reportage that cuts straight to the chase. Historians have written exhaustively about it and there are many fine documentaries available.

Binyon was a multi-talented man whose poetry improved as he grew older. His poem about the London Blitz, "The Burning of the Leaves" is a case in point, a private reflection about the nature of darkness and light. Here he invokes the image of a statue of Apollo (who built a sanctuary on the spot where he slew the serpent) to comment on the ambiguity of human struggle, of life and death, destruction and revival.

IV

"Beautiful, wearied head
Leant back against the arm upthrown behind,
Why are your eyes closed? Is it that they fear
Sight of these vast horizons shuddering red
And drawing near and near?
God--like shape, would you be blind
Rather than see the young leaves dropping dead
All round you in foul blasts of scorching wind,
As if the world, O disinherited,
That your own spirit willed
Since upon earth laughter and grief began
Should only in final mockery rebuild
A palace for the proudest ruin, Man?"

More than ever, this Anzac Day,

Lest We Forget.