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Laurence Binyon

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Robert Laurence Binyon (August 10, 1869 at Lancaster, England – March 10, 1943 at Reading, Berkshire) was a British poet, dramatist and art scholar.

Contents

Life & works

The son of Quakers, Binyon was educated at St Paul's High School and Trinity College, Oxford. He was already writing poetry by 1890, and won the Newdigate Prize for one poem whilst still at Oxford.

After graduation, from 1893 he worked at the Department of Printed Books in the British Museum. In 1904 he married fellow historian Cicely Margaret Powell, and the couple had three daughters. He later moved to the Museum's Department of Prints and Drawings, becoming the Assistant Keeper of Prints and Drawings in 1909. In 1913 he was made the Keeper of the new Sub-Department of Oriental Prints and Drawings. Many of his books produced while at the Museum were influenced by his sensibilities as a poet, although some are works of plain scholarship - such as his four-volume catalogue of all the Museum's English drawings.

Although too old to enlist in the First World War, he went to the Western Front in 1916 to work for the Red Cross as a medical orderly with an Ambulance Unit. He wrote about his experiences in For Dauntless France (1918).

For the Fallen

He is best known for the poem [[s:For the Fallen|For the Fallen]], written while sitting on The Rumps, Polseath Polzeath, Cornwall, and first published in The Times in September, 1914. The seven-verse poem honoured the World War I British war dead of that time and in particular the British Expeditionary Force, which had by then already had high casualty rates on the developing Western Front. The poem was published when the Battle of the Marne was foremost in people's minds.

The fourth verse from that poem has gained an existence of its own and is known today as the Ode of Remembrance - one that applies to all war dead:

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.
"The Ode" is still regularly recited on occasions such as Remembrance Day and Remembrance Sunday in the United Kingdom and Canada and ANZAC day in Australia and New Zealand, and adorns numerous war memorials including The Cenotaph in Whitehall. It is customarily read by an old soldier. In Australia's Returned and Services Leagues, it is read out nightly at 6 p.m.

‘Condemn’ or ‘contemn’?

There has been some debate as to whether the line “Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn” should end with the words ‘condemn’ or ‘contemn’. Contemn means to ‘despise’ therefore either word would make sense in the context of the stanza.

When the poem was printed ‘condemn’. This word was also used in The Winnowing Fan in which the poem was published later. Binyon would have had the chance to make amendments so it seems unlikely that the word contemn was meant. [link]

The issue of what word was meant seems only to have arisen in Australia, with little debate in other Commonwealth countries that mark Remembrance Day.

Music

Edward Elgar set Binyon's poems to music as The spirit of England: op. 80, for tenor or soprano solo, chorus and orchestra (1917).

Post-war life

After the war, he returned to the British Museum and wrote numerous books on art; in particular on William Blake, Persian art, and Japanese art. His work on ancient Japanese & Chinese cultures offered strongly contextualised examples that inspired, among others, the poets Ezra Pound, and W.B. Yeats. His work on Blake and his followers kept alive the then nearly-forgotten memory of the work of Samuel Palmer. Binyon's duality of interests continued the traditional interest of British visionary Romanticism in the rich strangeness of Mediterranean and Oriental cultures.

In 1931 his two volume Collected Poems appeared. In 1933, he was appointed Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. In 1934 he retired from the British Museum, having risen to be the Keeper of the Prints and Drawings Department, and went to live in the country at Westridge Green, near Streatley (where his daughters also came to live during the Second World War).

As well as writing poetry Binyon continued his academic work: in May 1939 he gave the prestigious Romanes Lecture in Oxford on Art and Freedom, and in 1940 he was appointed the Byron Professor of English Literature at University of Athens. He worked there until forced to leave before the German invasion of Greece in April 1941.

Binyon had been friends with Ezra Pound since around 1909, and in the 1930s the two became especially friendly - Pound affectionately called him "BinBin", and closely assisted Binyon with his Dante translation work. Another Binyon protege was Arthur Waley, whom Binyon employed at the British Museum. Binyon also introduced Robert Frost to the young Robert Bridges.

Between 1933 and 1943, Binyon published an acclaimed translation of Dante's Divina commedia in an English version of terza rima. At his death he was also working on a major three-part Arthurian trilogy; the first part of which was published after his death as The Madness of Merlin (1947).

There is a slate memorial at Aldworth, St. Mary's Church, where Binyon's ashes were scattered after death.

His daughter Helen Binyon (1904-1979) was an artist who studied with Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious. She illustrated many books for the Oxford University Press, and was also a marionettist. She later taught puppetry and published Puppetry Today (1966) and Professional Puppetry in England (1973).

Bibliography of key works

Poems and verse:

English arts & myth

Japanese & Persian arts:

Autobiography:

Biography:

Stage plays:

(Most of the above were written for John Masefield's theatre).

Further reading

External links

References

 

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