Singing or sad, intent they go;
They do not see the shadows grow;
"There yet is time," they lightly say,
"Before our work aside we lay";
Their task is but half-done, and lo!
Cometh the night.

In Due Season

If night should come and find me at my toil,
When all Life's day I had, tho' faintly, wrought,
And shallow furrows, cleft in stony soil
Were all my labour: Shall I count it naught

If only one poor gleaner, weak of hand,
Shall pick a scanty sheaf where I have sown?
"Nay, for of thee the Master doth demand
Thy work: the harvest rests with Him alone."

JOHN MCCRAE

An Essay in Character

by Sir Andrew Macphail

I. In Flanders Fields

"In Flanders Fields", the piece of verse from which this little book
takes its title, first appeared in 'Punch' in the issue of December
8th, 1915. At the time I was living in Flanders at a convent in front
of Locre, in shelter of Kemmel Hill, which lies seven miles south
and slightly west of Ypres. The piece bore no signature, but it was
unmistakably from the hand of John McCrae.

From this convent of women which was the headquarters of the 6th
Canadian Field Ambulance, I wrote to John McCrae, who was then at
Boulogne, accusing him of the authorship, and furnished him with
evidence. From memory--since at the front one carries one book only--I
quoted to him another piece of his own verse, entitled "The Night
Cometh":

"Cometh the night. The wind falls low,
The trees swing slowly to and fro;
Around the church the headstones grey
Cluster, like children stray'd away,
But found again, and folded so."

It will be observed at once by reference to the text that in form the
two poems are identical. They contain the same number of lines and
feet as surely as all sonnets do. Each travels upon two rhymes with the
members of a broken couplet in widely separated refrain. To the casual
reader this much is obvious, but there are many subtleties in the verse
which made the authorship inevitable. It was a form upon which he had
worked for years, and made his own. When the moment arrived the medium
was ready. No other medium could have so well conveyed the thought.

This familiarity with his verse was not a matter of accident. For many
years I was editor of the 'University Magazine