Laurence Binyon

Robert Laurence Binyon (10 August 1869 at Lancaster – 10 March 1943 at Reading, Berkshire) was an English poet, dramatist and art scholar. His most famous work For the Fallen is well known for being used in Remembrance Sunday services.

For the Fallen

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were , spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

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.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

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.

This is most probably the most famous of Laurence Binyon's poems, one of the verses is also used world-wide as a symbol of remembrance for the war-dead of WWI. After the fourth verse (shown bold) is spoken, the last line is repeated by everyone involved in that act of remembrance.

Life & works

The son of Quakers, Binyon was educated at St Paul's School and Trinity College, Oxford. He was already writing poetry by 1891, and won the Newdigate Prize for one poem whilst still at Oxford.

After graduation, from 1893 he worked at the Department of Printed Books in the British Museum. In 1904 he married fellow historian Cicely Margaret Powell, and the couple had three daughters. He later moved to the Museum's Department of Prints and Drawings, becoming the Assistant Keeper of Prints and Drawings in 1909. In 1913 he was made the Keeper of the new Sub-Department of Oriental Prints and Drawings. Many of his books produced while at the Museum were influenced by his sensibilities as a poet, although some are works of plain scholarship - such as his four-volume catalogue of all the Museum's English drawings.

Although too old to enlist in the First World War, he went to the Western Front in 1916 to work for the Red Cross as a medical orderly with an Ambulance Unit. He wrote about his experiences in "For Dauntless France" (1918).

Today Binyon is most famous for his poem For the Fallen often recited at Remembrance Sunday services in the UK, and an integral part of Anzac Day services in Australia and New Zealand, and November 11th Remembrance Day services in Canada.

Music

Edward Elgar set to music three of Binyon's poems ("The Fourth of August", "To Women", and "For the Fallen", published collectively as "The Winnowing Fan") as "The spirit of England: op. 80, for tenor or soprano solo, chorus and orchestra" (1917).

Post-war life

After the war, he returned to the British Museum and wrote numerous books on art; in particular on William Blake, Persian art, and Japanese art. His work on ancient Japanese & Chinese cultures offered strongly contextualised examples that inspired, among others, the poets Ezra Pound, and W.B. Yeats. His work on Blake and his followers kept alive the then nearly-forgotten memory of the work of Samuel Palmer. Binyon's duality of interests continued the traditional interest of British visionary Romanticism in the rich strangeness of Mediterranean and Oriental cultures.

In 1931 his two volume "Collected Poems" appeared. In 1933, he was appointed Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. In 1934 he retired from the British Museum, having risen to be the Keeper of the Prints and Drawings Department, and went to live in the country at Westridge Green, near Streatley (where his daughters also came to live during the Second World War).

As well as writing poetry Binyon continued his academic work: in May 1939 he gave the prestigious Romanes Lecture in Oxford on "Art and Freedom", and in 1940 he was appointed the Byron Professor of English Literature at University of Athens. He worked there until forced to leave before the German invasion of Greece in April 1941.

Binyon had been friends with Ezra Pound since around 1909, and in the 1930s the two became especially friendly - Pound affectionately called him "BinBin", and closely assisted Binyon with his Dante translation work. Another Binyon protege was Arthur Waley, whom Binyon employed at the British Museum. Binyon also introduced Robert Frost to the young Robert Bridges.

Between 1933 and 1943, Binyon published an acclaimed translation of Dante's "Divina commedia" in an English version of "terza rima". At his death he was also working on a major three-part Arthurian trilogy; the first part of which was published after his death as "The Madness of Merlin" (1947).

There is a slate memorial at Aldworth, St. Mary's Church, where Binyon's ashes were scattered after death. On November 11th, 1985, Binyon was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner [http://net.lib.byu.edu/english/wwi/poets/poets.html] . The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity." [http://net.lib.byu.edu/english/wwi/poets/Preface.html]

Daughters

His three daughters Helen, Margaret and Nicolete became artists. Helen Binyon (1904-1979) studied with Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious, illustrating many books for the Oxford University Press, and was also a marionettist. She later taught puppetry and published "Puppetry Today" (1966) and "Professional Puppetry in England" (1973). Margaret Binyon wrote children's books, which were illustrated by Helen. Nicholete, as Nicolete Gray, was a distinguished calligrapher and art scholar. [John Hatcher, "Binyon, (Robert) Laurence (1869–1943)", "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography", Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31890 accessed 25 Aug 2008] ]

Bibliography of key works

Poems and verse:

*"Lyric Poems" (1894)
*"Porphyrion and other Poems" (1898)
*"Odes" (1901)
*"Death of Adam and Other Poems" (1904)
*"London Visions" (1908)
*"England and Other Poems" (1909)
*"For The Fallen", "The Times", September 21 1914
*"Winnowing Fan" (1914)
*"The Anvil" (1916)
*"The Cause" (1917)
*"The New World: Poems" (1918)
*"The Idols" (1928)
*"Collected Poems Vol 1: London Visions, Narrative Poems, Translations." (1931)
*"Collected Poems Vol 2: Lyrical Poems." (1931)
*"The North Star and Other Poems" (1941)
*"The Burning of the Leaves and Other Poems" (1944)
*"The Madness of Merlin" (1947)

English arts & myth

*"William Blake: Being all his Woodcuts Photographically Reproduced in Facsimile" (1902)
*"English Poetry in its relation to painting and the other arts" (1918)
*"Drawings and Engravings of William Blake" (1922)
*"Arthur: A Tragedy" (1923)
*"The Followers of William Blake" (1925)
*"The Engraved Designs of William Blake" (1926)
*"Landscape in English Art and Poetry" (1931)
*"English Watercolours" (1933)
*"Gerard Hopkins and his influence" (1939)
*"Art and freedom". (The Romanes lecture, delivered 25 May 1939). Oxford: The Clarendon press, (1939)

Japanese & Persian arts:

*"Painting in the Far East" (1908)
*"Japanese Art" (1909)
*"Flight of the Dragon" (1911)
*"The Court Painters of the Grand Moguls" (1921)
*"Japanese Colour Prints" (1923)
*"The Poems of Nizami" (1928) (Translation)
*"Persian Miniature Painting" (1933)
*"The Spirit of Man in Asian Art" (1936)

Autobiography:

*"For Dauntless France" (1918) (War memoir)

Biography:

*"Botticelli" (1913)
*"Akbar" (1932)

Stage plays:

*"Brief Candles" (Richard III's life as a verse-drama)
*"Godstow Nunnery: Play"
*"Boadicea; A Play in eight Scenes"
*"Attila: a Tragedy in Four Acts"
*"Ayuli: a Play in three Acts and an Epilogue"
*"Sophro the Wise: a Play for Children"

(Most of the above were written for John Masefield's theatre).

Further reading

*Hatcher, John. "Laurence Binyon: Poet, Scholar of East and West". Clarendon Press, 1995. ISBN 0-19-812296-9.

External links

* (poem)
* [http://themargins.net/anth/1930-1939/binyonkoyasan.html "Koya San"] (poem)
* [http://net.lib.byu.edu/english/WWI/poets/LaurenceBinyon(Big).html Portrait of Laurence Binyon]
*Textes of [http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=Binyon%2C%20Laurence%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts Laurence Binyon] on Archive.org

References

*Giddings, Robert. "The War Poets" (London: Bloomsbury, 1998). ISBN 0-7475-4271-6.
*Checkland, Olive. "Japan and Britain After 1859: Creating Cultural Bridges" (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002). ISBN 0-7007-1747-1.
*Zhaoming Qian. "The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens" (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). ISBN 0-8139-2176-7.