Speaker and characters

The poem “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae features a collective speaker which functions as a sort of narrator (however, do not use this term)— the dead soldiers — and an intended recipient, the surviving soldiers.

The dead soldiers

The poem is written in the first-person plural, marked by adjectives and pronouns like “our” (l. 3) or “we” (l. 7), which indicate that the speaker is a collective character. This collective character is represented by soldiers who died in Flanders, first suggested by the reference to “crosses” (l. 2) and then explicitly depicted: “We are the Dead.” (l. 7).

These soldiers have only recently died and, until that point, they were like any other human being, appreciating nature’s beauty and love:

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie (ll. 8-9)

The poem also indicates the dead soldiers to have been ...