Point of View

The poem is written from the first-person perspective of a communal speaker, "we." The speaker describes the scenery of the setting – Flanders field, full of budding poppies in between rows of graves for fallen soldiers. In the second stanza, the speaker announces, "We are the Dead" (6). This declaration alerts readers to the fact that the speaker is addressing them from beyond the grave, and that the speaker represents a collective group of soldiers who died in battle. This communal perspective is significant because it emphasizes the sheer number of deaths that occurred during World War I, while also maintaining the poem's patriotic argument: the speaker is not a single person, but instead the infantry as a whole, dramatizing the phenomenon of union under a common cause.

Language and Meaning

The language of "In Flanders Fields" is generally accessible and straightforward. The speaker does not romanticize...