Binyon

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Laurence Binyon (1869-1943), English poet and academic, has his moment in the (rising) sun each year at various commemorative occasions in the English speaking world.

This occurs especially in Australia and New Zealand where, on the 25th April each year, ANZAC Day is commemorated with dawn services and Anzac Day marches across both countries - and at the battle site in the Dardanelles, Turkey. The campaign is said to have “blooded” the new-born nations.

Binyon wrote many volumes of poems whilst maintaining his day job in the British Museum as an art expert and authority on Oriental painting. He also managed to find the time to translate Dante’s famous medieval Italian vernacular into English.

Binyon’s lines appeared in a work originally named “Ode of Remembrance”. The familiar lines are:

They went with songs to the battle, they were young.
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.
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 second of these stanzas is read at each of the hundreds of dawn services across these allegedly godless lands. It is usually followed by words from the last line of each of the stanzas from Kipling”s “Recessional” – “Lest we forget.” The poem was written before Gallipoli, but it soon struck a chord and had become a part of the commemorations by 1921.