Memorial Day Quotes
This page is assembled from three others: War, Death and Gratitude. There is no memorial collection underneath it. One poem is filed against the day itself, Joyce Kilmer’s, in Trees and Other Poems (1914), and it opens with a bugle that, he says, is not singing of war today.
The rest is whatever the three source pages rate highest, so it leans toward poetry and toward writers who saw war up close. Several famous lines about death and sacrifice carry flags here, so read the note on a quote’s own page before you attach a name to it.
O, now doth Death line his dead chaps with steel;
The swords of soldiers are his teeth, his fangs.
But, oh! fell death's untimely frost,
That nipt my flower sae early.
O fairest flower! no sooner blown but blasted,
Soft silken primrose fading timelessly.
Who now travels that dark path from whose bourne they say no one returns.
That last day does not bring extinction to us, but change of place.