''The Falling Leaves'' is a poem written by Margaret Postgate-Cole (1893–1980) in November 1915 about

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

. Cole was an English atheist, feminist, pacifist, and socialist; her pacifist views influenced her poetry. Her brother was jailed for refusing to obey

conscription Conscription (also called the draft in the United States) is the state-mandated enlistment of people in a national service, mainly a military service. Conscription dates back to antiquity and it continues in some countries to the present day un ...

. She wrote poems about World War I and against the government. In

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

she wrote propaganda poems in favour of the war. The poem is calm and demonstrates that people on the home front during the war remained ignorant of what was happening on the Western front. The poem says, "I saw the brown leaves dropping from their tree". The leaves represent soldiers on the battlefield who are left to rot, forgotten and lost forever. Another simile is "Like snowflakes falling on the Flemish clay." The snowflakes represent the soldiers, melting together, forgotten. The Flemish clay is the Belgian soil where the fighting took place. Every snowflake is different so the snowflakes also represent how every soldier in the war was different. This poem is included in the AQA GCSE Poetry Anthology "Moon on the Tides" for 2010 and 2011. It was also included in the OCR GCSE Poetry Anthology "Opening Lines" in the 1914-1918 WAR (ii), for 2006 to 2011.

References

English poems World War I poems 1915 poems {{Poem-stub