We used to scorn bowdlerizing texts, now we do it without even thinking.

An interesting observation. From Tillman’s Poetry Corner: Flanders Fields. In some ways, his argument feels a bit precious at first but as Tillman develops his case, it becomes more convincing.

John McCrae’s Flanders Fields is iconic. No more need be said. Unfortunately, its meaning has been distorted by the most popular voice and instrumental accompaniment. This new reading of the poem has transformed Flanders Fields’ meaning. My guess is that this metamorphosis was unintentional, but one and all should work to recover the original public meaning.

This is Flanders Fields. The key two changes are in bold.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

[snip]

There is a new rendition, and it has grown quite popular because its score (for voice and instruments) is simple and beautiful—making it all the more pernicious. This is how Flanders Fields is now read:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly.

Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up your quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

There is further elaboration.

He closes the argument with:

I don’t think all these changes were intentional. It is just the concept of devotion and sacrifice to a national cause is nearly incomprehensible to moderns. The revised version is the best sense a modern could make of the poem and was probably how they (mis)heard it because they could not otherwise recognize the original meaning. So their mind played a trick on them and modified the words into something more sensible which they could understand. This sort of thing happens all the time when modern readers read old or pre-modern law. Viz, “the prisoner shall not receive the benefit of clergy” has confused modern readers for 100s of year.

Indeed. This is an issue which I think MacNeice captured wonderfully in his Autumn Journal Part IX.

The Gloomy Academic
by Louis MacNeice

The Glory that was Greece: put it in a syllabus, grade it
Page by page
To train the mind or even to point a moral
For the present age:
Models of logic and lucidity, dignity, sanity,
The golden mean between opposing ills...
But I can do nothing so useful or so simple;
These dead are dead
And when I should remember the paragons of Hellas
I think instead
Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists,
The careless athletes and the fancy boys,
The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics
And the Agora and the noise
Of the demagogues and the quacks; and the women pouring
Libations over graves
And the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta and lastly
I think of the slaves.
And how one can imagine oneself among them
I do not know;
It was all so unimaginably different
And all so long ago.

The past is different. We were more mortal, life was more precarious, actions more necessary, issues more real.

Comfort and security and prosperity divorces us from the primal passions, the old truths, the Gods of the Copybook Headings.

This dulling of the modern mind, the emptying of the mind of knowledge and feel for history, the cleaning up of our past primal being into an antiseptic, less disturbing, and anodyne rendition should be resisted. We used to scorn bowdlerizating texts, now we do it without even thinking.