Where have all the flowers gone?
The girls have picked them every one.
Oh, when will they ever learn?

These lines come from the folk song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, closely associated with Pete Seeger, who helped popularize it in the early Cold War era. Seeger adapted and expanded an earlier fragment he encountered (often traced to a Cossack folk song via an English translation), shaping it into a cyclical lament that moves from flowers to young women, to soldiers, to graves, and back to flowers. The song became widely sung in the late 1950s and 1960s and was embraced by the folk revival and antiwar movements, especially as U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated.

The stanza uses a deceptively simple question-and-answer structure to evoke loss and repetition. Flowers—symbols of beauty, youth, and transience—are “picked” by girls, suggesting innocence and courtship, but the refrain “Oh, when will they ever learn?” signals that this is not merely pastoral nostalgia. In the full song’s cycle, the picking of flowers leads to marriage, then to soldiers, then to graves, implying how ordinary human rituals and desires are drawn into recurring patterns of war and mourning. The repeated question becomes a moral indictment of collective forgetfulness and a plea to break the cycle.

1) “Where have all the flowers gone? / Long time passing.”
2) “Where have all the flowers gone? / Young girls picked them every one.”
3) “Oh, when will they ever learn? / Oh, when will they ever learn?”