What is the Ode of Remembrance?

The Ode of Remembrance is the four-line verse recited at every ANZAC Day dawn service, Remembrance Day ceremony, and military funeral in Australia. The full text reads: 'They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them.'

The verse is the fourth stanza of a longer poem called 'For the Fallen', written by the English poet and British Museum scholar Laurence Binyon in September 1914, just six weeks into the First World War. Binyon wrote the poem on the cliffs of Cornwall, in response to early reports of heavy British casualties in France. He completed the poem before any large-scale British death toll had been published, which makes its language all the more striking.

At Australian commemorations, the Ode is recited by a single speaker from a lectern beside the catafalque. The crowd joins in to repeat the fourth line ('We will remember them'). The phrase 'Lest we forget', drawn from Rudyard Kipling's 1897 poem 'Recessional', is then added by the crowd as a closing response. The Last Post follows on the bugle, then a minute's silence, then the Rouse.

The Ode is engraved on countless Australian war memorials, on the stone walls of the Australian War Memorial's Hall of Memory in Canberra, on bronze plaques at RSL clubs, and on military headstones in Australia and overseas. The Royal British Legion and the Returned and Services League both recognise Binyon's verse as the standard text of remembrance, and the same words are used in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Canada at parallel ceremonies.