A Sonnet in Remembrance (A Poppy Blooms)

I wanted to write a sonnet which could be sung on Remembrance Sunday.

I’ve recently been enjoying using ‘artificial intelligence’ to create music, so I set about using all the tools available to me to create it.

I set the words to a musical accompaniment of two voices, with harmonies between and man’s and a woman’s voice, with mandocello and violin. A mandocello is to a mandolin as a cello is to a violin. It’s the large instrument in the mandolin family and has a beautiful deep tone. It’s an instrument I’ve loved ever since I heard Steve Knightley of Show of Hands playing one made by David Oddie.

Here’s the sonnet below, with its traditional rhyming scheme, iambic pentameter rhythm, and final couplet bringing it all together over the fourteen lines.

And here it is to listen to:

Dedicated to Thomas Edward Higgins, my relative, who died on Sunday 20 October 1918, just a month before the First World War ended. He is buried with over 4,300 other British service men near Boulogne. He was just 34 years old.

The Poppy Blooms

The poppy blooms where desert dust once flew,
A scarlet thread that ties us to the lost,
Where sons and daughters wore their country’s hue
And paid in blood the peace-demanded cost.
Their names are whispers carved in silent stone,
While empty chairs sit waiting by the fire,
And children grow who’ve never really known
The voice, the laugh, the hand of their own father.
We pin our crimson petals to the breast,
A garden grown from sacrifice and pain,
For those who gave their all and found no rest
In lands where poppies will not bloom again.
        Two minutes still—we stand and we recall
        The debt we owe, though we can’t pay it all.

Thanks so much for listening. Please support our ex-service men and women where you can, and remember those we have lost through war. If you have enjoyed the sonnet and its musical setting, please consider a donation to the Royal British Legion. Thank you.