"To Women" by Laurence Binyon

The Sisters, by Edmund Dulac
IWM ART 2059

One of the best-known English poems of the First World War is one of the earliest written: Laurence Binyon’s “For the Fallen” appeared in the London Times on 21 September 1914, shortly after Britain entered the First World War. The poem’s fourth stanza is still recited today at British and Commonwealth Remembrance ceremonies:

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.

Shortly after the war had ended, in July of 1919, The Quarterly Review praised Binyon as “the mouthpiece of English culture under the duress of war, interpreting its deepest emotions ... in those two immortal poems ‘To Women’ and ‘For the Fallen.’” The reviewer said, “As regards the first, who has hitherto ever so well described before the woman’s part in war?”* 

Today, few readers know of Binyon second “immortal poem,” and it rarely appears in modern anthologies of First World War poetry. 

To Women 

From illustrated poem "To Women"
in The Fallen (1917)

Your hearts are lifted up, your hearts

That have foreknown the utter price.

Your hearts burn upward like a flame

Of splendour and of sacrifice.



For you, you too, to battle go,

Not with the marching drums and cheers

But in the watch of solitude

And through the boundless night of fears.



Swift, swifter than those hawks of war,

Those threatening wings that pulse the air,

Far as the vanward ranks are set,

You are gone before them, you are there!



And not a shot comes blind with death

And not a stab of steel is pressed

Home, but invisibly it tore

And entered first a woman's breast.



Amid the thunder of the guns,

The lightnings of the lance and sword

Your hope, your dread, your throbbing pride,

Your infinite passion is outpoured



From hearts that are as one high heart

Withholding naught from doom and bale

Burningly offered up, — to bleed,

To bear, to break, but not to fail!
        —Laurence Binyon

“To Women” was published in the London Times on 20 August 1914, and it was reprinted in numerous volumes during the war.** In many ways, the poem is highly conventional in its imagery and sentiments as it references symbols of chivalry (such as lances and swords) and talks of “splendor and sacrifice.” The poem repeatedly uses images of fire and flame to depict women’s noble and searing pain as they offer up the men they love. 

In poem’s the last stanza, women are praised for “Withholding naught from doom and bale / Burningly offered up.” The word bale is Old English in origin: it suggests the active operation of evil as “destroying, blasting, injuring, hurting, paining, tormenting,” and although the usage is now obsolete, it also describes “a great consuming fire,” specifically a funeral pyre.*** This word and its associated imagery may suggest that, like Viking or Hindu widows, women give themselves to be consumed by their sacrifice, immolated on pyres of grief and loss. 

Illustration for "To Women"
from The Fallen (1917)

The poem is strikingly modern, however, in describing the effects of modern industrial war that extend far beyond the combat zones. The anguish that women experience precedes even the sufferings of soldiers. The first stanza proclaims that, before all others, women “have foreknown the utter price.” Like military combatants, women also “to battle go,” but “swifter than those hawks of war,” women are in the “vanward ranks.” The poem says of women during war time, “You are gone before them, you are there!” Every artillery shot and “stab of steel” enters “first a woman’s breast” [emphasis mine].

Just weeks into the war, Binyon’s “To Women” anticipated the burden that uncertainty and anxious waiting would lay on women.  In diary entries from 1915, Vera Brittain breathes a horrible kind of life into the sacrifices described in Binyon’s poem. She writes of her sweetheart Roland Leighton, “I can’t help thinking what a terrible nerve-strain it must have been for him—all the long expectation of an attack, & the waiting, waiting for it to come,” and then describes her own ordeal: “It has been a dreadful day—waiting and waiting & able to settle to nothing” (diary 27 Sept. 1915). The next day she writes, “This has been a terrible day—a day of waiting & restlessness & anxiety, of feeling it was impossible for any news of individuals yet, but nevertheless thinking that all the time perhaps news—the worst news—might come” (diary 28 Sept. 1915), and one day later, “Still no news—still waiting & weariness, & a heart growing almost numb with its pain” (diary 29 Sept. 1915). Less than a week later, she writes, “One is always waiting, waiting in this war. It is enough to turn one’s hair grey—is a thousand times worse than hard work” (diary 6 Oct. 1915).****

Today, Binyon is remembered for his poem dedicated to fallen soldiers of the Great War. For his contemporaries, his poem for stricken women who bore the burdens of war was equally as powerful. 

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* Cloudesley Brereton, “The Poetry of Laurence Binyon,” in The Quarterley Review, July 1919, p. 151, 148. 

** It appeared in Binyon’s collection The Winnowing Fan (1915), in his three-war-poem illustrated collection For the Fallen (1917), and it was set to music (along with “For the Fallen” and “The Fourth of August”) by Edward Elgar in 1917. 

*** The Oxford English Dictionary, bale, n1 and n2. The dictionary notes that although obsolete, William Morris used the word in 1876 to refer to a funeral pyre in his Story of Sigurd.
**** Vera Brittain, Chronicle of Youth: The War Diary, 1913–1917.