Empty olive cloth cap on a neatly folded gray fabric square

Original artwork, not a still

'The Young Dead Soldiers'

Archibald MacLeish

Who has not heard them? They say: We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning!

Behind the line

What it means

Our interpretation.

The passage imagines the dead leaving their deaths to those who hear them. Asking for meaning turns that legacy into a responsibility for others. The force of the appeal lies in what the living are asked to make of those deaths.

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