Sir – Christopher Gray (Gray Matter, September 18) thinks it a source of shame to Oxford that Laurence Binyon, who had strong links with the university and its neighbourhood, is not better known.
It should be a source of shame to Gray that he misquotes Binyon’s famous poem, For the Fallen. Binyon wrote: ‘They shall grow not old, as we are that are left grow old’. Gray rewrites this as ‘They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old’. I have italicised the words which he incorrectly transposes.
Gray’s version is obvious: the dead will not grow old, but we shall. Binyon said something more subtle and more powerful: the dead will remain growing in our memories, but will grow ‘not old’ as do those who remain.
He might have said that the war dead are for ever young or immortal or deathless in the worn clichés of memorials; but the sombre monosyllables, the slightly halting rhythm and the unexpectedly inverted phrase — ‘they shall grow not old’ — are more telling. It is a pity that Gray mangled them.
Chris Hall, Turville
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