John McCrae War Poems

Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander McCrae, MD (1872 – 1918)

War Poems by John McCrae

• A Song of Comfort
• Sleep, weary ones, while ye may...
• Anarchy
• I saw a city filled with lust and shame...
• Disarmament
• One spake amid the nations, Let us cease...
• Equality
• I saw a King, who spent his life to weave...
• Eventide
• The day is past and the toilers cease...
• In Due Season
• If night should come and find me at my toil...
• In Flanders Fields
• In Flanders fields the poppies blow...
• Isandlwana
• Scarlet coats, and crash o' the band...
• Mine Host
• There stands a hostel by a travelled way...
• Penance
• My lover died a century ago...
• Quebec
• Of old, like Helen, guerdon of the strong...
• Recompense
• I saw two sowers in Life's field at morn...
• Slumber Songs
• Sleep, little eyes...
• The Anxious Dead
• O guns, fall silent till the dead men hear...
• The Captain
• Here all the day she swings from tide to tide...
• The Dead Master
• Amid earth's vagrant noises, he caught the note sublime...
• The Dying of Pere Pierre
• With two other priests; the same night he died...
• The Harvest of the Sea
• The earth grows white with harvest; all day long...
• The Hope of My Heart
• I left, to earth, a little maiden fair...
• The Night Cometh
• Cometh the night. The wind falls low...
• The Oldest Drama
• It fell on a day, that he went out to his father to the reapers...
• The Pilgrims
• An uphill path, sun-gleams between the showers...
• The Shadow of the Cross
• At the drowsy dusk when the shadows creep...
• The Song of the Derelict
• Ye have sung me your songs, ye have chanted your rimes...
• The Unconquered Dead
• Defeated, with great loss...
• The Warrior
• He wrought in poverty, the dull grey days...
• Then and Now
• Beneath her window in the fragrant night...
• Unsolved
• Amid my books I lived the hurrying years...
• Upon Watts Picture - Sic Transit
• What I spent I had; what I saved, I lost; what I gave, I have...

Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander McCrae was a Canadian, poet, physician, author artist and soldier during the First World War, most noted for his poem “In Flander’s Fields”.

Born in Guelph, Ontario, McCrae studied at the Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute and later went on to study medicine on a scholarship at the University of Toronto.

John McCrae had previously served in the artillery division during the Second Boer War. With Canada being part of the British Empire, when war with Germany was declared, McCrae was appointed as Field Surgeon in the Canadian Artillery division, and took charge of a field hospital during the Second Battle of Ypres, 1915.

The famous poem, In Flanders Fields, was inspired by the loss of a friend and former student – Lt. Alexis Helmer, whom was killed in battle. In 1918 McCrae himself died, having caught pneumonia and meningitis.