In Flanders Fields

The poem opens with a description of the poem’s setting, emphasizing both the location and the peculiar nature of the place: “In Flanders Fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row / That mark our place” (Lines 1-3). The “Flanders Fields” of the first line refer to a location in Belgium, but these are no ordinary fields—they are a cemetery full of war graves, with “crosses, row on row” that “mark” the individual plots where each veteran is buried. The image of the “poppies blow[ing]” upon the graves also introduces the poem’s central symbol, one that is as red as the blood that has been spilt in the battle. The poem’s narration is also revealed in Line 3 to be that of a group of speakers instead of an individual one, with the speakers claiming the graves as “our place.” The use of the possessive our makes it clear that the graves belong to the speakers: The dead are describing their own gravesite and speaking directly to the living. The explicitly-identified setting immediately draws attention to the specificity of the speakers’ circumstances, alluding to the Second Battle of Ypres and thereby linking the war dead to a particular event and location in World War I (See: Background).