An Old Refrain

We shall not sleep, though poppies growIn Flanders fields. — John McCrae

The Canadian military doctor John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” was an instant success when it appeared in Punch magazine in December 1915. It went on to become the most widely published and quoted English poem of the First World War.

The intricate structure, however, caused some confusion: the poem’s fifteen lines are broken up into three unequal stanzas, it uses only two rhymes in an irregular sequence, and the first three words are repeated as a refrain at the end of the second and third stanzas. Several of the “reply” poems inspired by its popularity tried to echo this structure only to end up mangling...