User:Serial Number 54129/Flanders

Writing
One of only two poems McCrae composed during the war.

Structure
Andrew Macphail notes that the poem was one line longer than a sonnet in iambic tetrameter, with two Hemistiches comprising two iambic feet apiece. Indeed, notes Macpahail, had the two half lines been combined, it would have created a sonnet, which form in earlier work McCrae had made his own.

The poem uses only two rhyme sounds, a long O and i, while the third ending—field-remains rhymeless. Macphail suggested that long could be seen as representing "the O of wonder, of hope, of aspiration", while the other could be that of the first person singular pronoun, representing "personal pride, of jealous immortality, of the Ego against the Universe".

The original poem gave each rhyming line a different indentation, although this irregularity has not always been maintained in reprints.

The critic Nancy Holmes has argued that

Imagery
Traditional images from the battlefield contrast with those of nature, such as birds and poppies. Described as arcadian by Paul Fussell, harking back to an old British poetic tradition "resolutely pastoral and floral".{{sfn|Fussell|1975|p=24.{{efn|Randing, he suggests, from Spenser's Epithalamion to Mathew Arnold's 'The Scholar Gypsy, for example.{{sfn|Fussell|1975|p=251}}|group=note}} A tradition still continuing, as epitomised by the work of contemporaries such as Wilfred Owen and [Rupert Brooke]].{{sfn|Ward|2014|p=100}}

However the swift introduction of the second-person plural introduces, suggests Ward, something "supernatural", in the unified voice of the fallen.{{sfn|Ward|2014|p=100}}

Music
"Soon after its initial appearances in print, 'In Flanders Fields' found popularity among composers from all across the country—both men and women and American citizens as well as foreign nationals living in the United States. Straddling the boundaries between popular song and art song, the musical settings often used elements of both."

McCrae's poem, while not the most popular in terms of sales or performances, received the greatest number of settings, with at least 55 in the three years following the US entry into the war. The poems popularity in the US coincided with that country's joining the war,

Themes
The most obvious theme, writes Ward, is that of the call to arms.

Influence
The poem had an immediate contemporary impact, and, says ward, by the Armistice, it "had become one of the most famous poems of the War".