Laurence Binyon, “For the Fallen” (1914) “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.” This is the Ode of Remembrance, read at services across the Commonwealth. Binyon wrote it in the first weeks of the war, before the scale of the losses was known.

John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields” (1915) “In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row.” McCrae was a Canadian army doctor who wrote this after burying a friend near Ypres. The poem is the reason the poppy became the symbol of remembrance.

John Maxwell Edmonds, the Kohima Epitaph “When you go home, tell them of us and say, / For your tomorrow, we gave our today.” Edmonds wrote it during the First World War. It became famous when it was carved on the memorial at Kohima after the 1944 battle, so it now speaks for both wars.

Wilfred Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” (1917) “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? / Only the monstrous anger of the guns.” Owen sets the dignity of a funeral against the anonymity of death at the front. He was killed one week before the Armistice, and his mother received the telegram while the church bells were ringing for the peace.

Wilfred Owen, draft preface to his poems (1918) “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” In one line he gives a whole account of what war writing is for.

Rupert Brooke, “The Soldier” (1914) “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England.” This poem shows the idealism of 1914. If you place it next to Owen, you can see how the mood of the war changed. Brooke died in 1915 and was buried on Skyros.

Siegfried Sassoon, “Aftermath” (1919) “Have you forgotten yet?… / Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.” Sassoon wrote this a few months after the Armistice. He had already begun to fear that people would forget, and that fear is what Remembrance is there to answer.