Everyone Sang

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away … O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

“Everyone Sang,” Siegfried Sasson (November 1918)

There is such joy and hope in this poem, by some accounts written moments after hearing the news on the day of the Armistice.

Compare to “In Flanders Fields,” more commonly associated with the war, at least by this schoolboy.

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.

“In Flanders Fields,” John McCrae (2 May 1915)

Written after the death of a friend in the Second Battle of Ypres, here the countless dead beg the living to fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy, and throw good money, or lives in this case, after bad. In 1915 the war was still not entirely hopeless.

Sassoon addressed the waste of war in other poems. Whether “Everyone Sang” is a hymn in response to the peace or not, there’s a moment of hope, of life breaking out in joy.

Hear Siegfied Sassoon read “Everyone Sang” at the Poetry Archive.