Thoughts on war: F. S. Flint – Lament (Published on 11/08/2026)
Lament
by F. S. Flint
The young men of the world
Are condemned to death.
They have been called up to die
For the crime of their fathers.
The young men of the world,
The growing, the ripening fruit,
Have been tom from their branches,
While the memory of the blossom
Is sweet in women’s hearts;
They have been cast for a cruel purpose
Into the mashing-press and furnace.
The young men of the world
Look into each other’s eyes,
And read there the same words:
Not yet! Not yet!
But soon perhaps, and perhaps certain.
(source: Poems of the Great War 1914-1918 [Penguin Books, 1998], p. 115 f.)
Frank Stuart Flint, born on December 19, 1885, in Islington, London, and died on February 28, 1960, in Berkshire, was a British poet and translator. Having grown up in poverty, he had to leave school at age 13 to work and earn money for his family. He continued his education by attending evening schools for workers and later became fluent in ten languages. Following the unexpected death of his wife in 1920, Flint stopped writing his own poetry and, until his death, worked exclusively as a translator and literary critic.
His poem “Lament,” one of his most powerful and somber antiwar poems, was inspired by his experiences during World War I and was published in his final collection of poetry “Otherworld: Cadences” (1920). Flint served in World War I beginning in 1917, but had already experienced the horrors of war in London, which he processed in various poems published after the war’s end, including “Lament”.
English participants in World War I, in particular, produced a wealth of poetry on various aspects of the war; although initially written from an English perspective, these works – such as those by MacLeish, McCrae, Binyon or Brooke – can now, more than a decade later, be regarded as almost universally applicable.
(Head picture: Gravestone at the British military cemetery Reichswald
near Kleve/Germany, November 2025)
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