Explore "The Fields of Flanders" by Edith Nesbit on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
LAST year the fields were all glad and gay / With silver daisies and silver may; / There were kingcups gold by the river's edge / And primrose stars under every hedge.
This year the fields are trampled and brown, / The hedges are broken and beaten down, / And where the primroses used to grow / Are little black crosses set in a row.
And the flower of hopes, and the flowers of dreams, / The noble, fruitful, beautiful schemes, / The tree of life with its fruit and bud, / Are trampled down in the mud and the blood.
The changing seasons will bring again / The magic of Spring to our wood and plain: / Though the Spring be so green as never was seen / The crosses will still be black in the green.
The God of battles shall judge the foe / Who trampled our country and laid her low . . .
God! hold our hands on the reckoning day, / Lest all we owe them we should repay.
1915.