Laurence Binyon

The Orphans of Flanders

Where is the land that fathered, nourished, poured
The sap of a strong race into your veins,—

Wide tilth

Tilth = cultivated farmland. Pre-war Flanders was Europe's breadbasket—flat, fertile fields stretching to the horizon. Now it's trenches and craters.

Land of wide tilth, of farms and granaries stored,
And old towers chiming over peaceful plains?
It is become a vision, barred away
Like light in cloud, a memory, a belief.
On those lost plains the Glory of yesterday
Builds her dark towers for the bells of Grief.

Glory's dark towers

Inverts the earlier 'old towers chiming'—same landscape, but now the towers are metaphorical (military glory) and the bells ring for death instead of village life.

It is become a splendour-circled name
For all the world. A torch against the skies

Unpardoned shame

The 'blood-spot' is Belgium itself. 'Unpardoned' = the world won't forgive Germany for violating Belgian neutrality—the official reason Britain entered WWI.

Burns from that blood-spot, the unpardoned shame
Of them that conquered: but your homeless eyes
See rather some brown pond by a white wall,
Red cattle crowding in the rutty lane,
Some garden where the hollyhocks were tall
In the Augusts that shall never be again.
There your thoughts cling as the long-thrusting root

Long-thrusting root

Agricultural metaphor for refugee children. Like plants, they're displaced but their roots (memories, identity) stay anchored in destroyed homeland.

Clings in the ground; your orphaned hearts are there.
O mates of sunburnt earth, your love is mute
But strong like thirst and deeper than despair.
You have endured what pity can but grope
To feel; into that darkness enters none.
We have but hands to help: yours is the hope
Whose silent courage rises with the sun.
Laurence Binyon
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Belgium as Propaganda and Reality

CONTEXT Binyon wrote this around 1914-15, when Belgian refugee children flooded into Britain after Germany invaded neutral Belgium. The invasion was Britain's casus belli—newspapers ran atrocity stories (some true, some exaggerated) about 'poor little Belgium.'

The poem's structure splits between public myth and private memory. First half: Belgium as 'splendour-circled name,' a 'torch against the skies'—the propaganda version, noble suffering for the world to admire. Second half: what the actual orphans remember—'brown pond,' 'red cattle,' 'hollyhocks.' Notice the shift from abstract nouns (Glory, Grief, Fame) to concrete images (pond, wall, lane).

The turn at line 12 ('but your homeless eyes') does the real work. The world sees Belgium as a symbol. The children see a specific garden. 'The Augusts that shall never be again'—not 'childhood' or 'innocence' but the particular late-summer months when hollyhocks bloomed. Binyon knows the difference between mourning an idea and mourning a place.

What Binyon Doesn't Say

The final stanza's tone is tricky. 'We have but hands to help' sounds humble—British charity workers admitting they can't truly understand refugee trauma. But 'yours is the hope / Whose silent courage rises with the sun' puts the burden back on the children. You're the ones who have to be brave.

This was standard rhetoric for war relief: the refugees must be stoic, grateful, resilient. Compare Binyon's earlier war poems (especially 'For the Fallen')—he consistently frames suffering as ennobling. The children's 'mute' love and 'silent courage' fit that pattern.

Watch the pronouns: 'we' appears only once, in the final stanza. The rest is 'you' and 'your.' The speaker observes, describes, instructs—but doesn't claim shared experience. That distance is the poem's honesty. He's writing *about* the orphans, not *as* one of them.