The Pilgrims

An uphill path, sun-gleams between the showers,

Where every beam that broke the leaden sky

Lit other hills with fairer ways than ours;

Some clustered graves where half our memories lie;

And one grim Shadow creeping ever nigh:

And this was Life.

Wherein we did another's burden seek,

The tired feet we helped upon the road,

The hand we gave the weary and the weak,

The miles we lightened one another's load,

When, faint to falling, onward yet we strode:

This too was Life.

Till, at the upland, as we turned to go

Amid fair meadows, dusky in the night,

The mists fell back upon the road below;

Broke on our tired eyes the western light;

The very graves were for a moment bright:

And this was Death.

John McCrae

John McCrae born in Guelph, Ontario, Canadian poet, soldier, and physician John McCrae earned his undergraduate and medical degrees at the University of Toronto, where he received the Gold Medal. McCrae’s well-known poem “In Flanders Fields” memorializes the April 1915 battle in Belgium’s Ypres salient. For 17 days, McCrae tended those injured in the battle. January 28, 1918, at the age of 45. McCrae was buried with full military honors in Wimereux Cemetery near Boulogne, France. His family home in Guelph is preserved as a museum, and the main street in Wimereux is now named Rue McCrae.

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