It’s the poem of the poppy, recited at every Remembrance Day — but “In Flanders Fields” is not the gentle elegy its reputation suggests. After two stanzas of larks and poppies and the quiet voice of the dead, McCrae’s final stanza pivots into something far harder: a demand from the fallen that the living “take up our quarrel” and keep fighting. The most beloved remembrance poem in English is also a war poem, and that tension is the source of both its power and its long controversy.