Every five years, I write an elegy to a famous poem about war. Barack Obama figures in this tradition, too: It started 10 years ago when he placed a wreath at Flanders Field American Cemetery and Memorial in Belgium.
"We can say we caught the torch," Obama said that day, addressing the fallen Americans buried in that hallowed ground. "We kept the faith."
The commander-in-chief was speaking at the backdrop for one of the most famous sonnets in the English language, "In Flanders Fields," which was penned on the spot by a grieving World War I Canadian Army officer named John McCrae. It struck me that today's date is a particularly fitting one on which to remember his verse: On March 26, 1874, Robert Frost was born; and on this date in 1892, Walt Whitman died.
Some of Walt Whitman's most evocative poetry -- I'm referring to the first rendition of "Leaves of Grass" -- was originally decreed in some quarters to be little more than smut. It wasn't Whitman's subsequent fame, or even his death, that changed that view so much as it was that the Civil War toughened Americans' collective hides, not to mention our literary sensibilities. Anyway, Whitman kept updating "Leaves of Grass," adding odes to Abraham Lincoln, and who could fault that?
When Walt Whitman died on this date in 1892, the New York Times essentially laid the old argument to rest, declaring in an editorial that he could not be called "a great poet unless we deny poetry to be an art."
Whitman had initially been called to his craft by a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay that was essentially a plea for a young American poet to emerge -- someone who could capture the nation's physical beauty, economic strength, while challenging its moral hypocrisy (he was alluding, at least partly, to slavery). The essay found its mark. "I was simmering, simmering, simmering," Whitman later wrote. "Emerson brought me to a boil."
By the time Whitman passed from the scene, the rocky soil of New England had produced another brawny bard, and when Robert Frost died at 88, the Times also placed him in the well-deserved pantheon. The paper's obituary noted that he was the only American poet to play a touching personal role at a presidential inauguration or to "twit the Russians about the barrier to Berlin by reading to them, on their own ground, his celebrated poem about another kind of wall."
At a time when a brutal Russian leader is reviving memories of the runup to World War II, it is worth dusting off poetic classics. Upon re-reading them, we may discover new insights in old verses. Which brings me back to Flanders Field.
John McCrae was a surgeon in a Canadian artillery unit in 1915 and was running an army field hospital when a mortally wounded lieutenant named Alexis Helmer was brought in during the Second Battle of Ypres. Helmer had been a student of McCrae's in Montreal. "In Flanders Fields" was penned in the physician's grief and published that same year in a London magazine.
McCrae was promoted during the war to lieutenant colonel, but he did not survive the war either. His poem lives on, although it has had different meanings to ensuing generations.
In only three short stanzas, McCrae managed to write a poem that is both a lament of the wasted lives of war, and a call to arms.
The first stanza sets the scene, the second mourns the fallen, and the third urges others to carry the torch referenced five years ago today by President Obama.
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.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
