Flanders Poppies

The case of the other red flower inseparable from writings about the Great War, the poppy, is even more complicated and interesting. Properly speaking, the Flanders poppy - it is called that now - is Papaver rhoeas, to be distinguished from the kind generally known in the United States, the California poppy, or Platystemon californicus. the main difference is that the California poppy is orange or yellow, the Flanders poppy bright scarlet. The familiarity of the California poppy to Americans has always created some impediment to their accurate interpretation of the rich and precise literary symbolism of Great war writing. If one imagines poppies as orange or yellow, those that blow between the crosses, row on row, will seem a detail more decoartive than symbolic. One will be likely to miss their crucial relation (the coincidence of McCrae's and Milton's rhyme-sound will suggest it) to that "sanguine flower inscrib'd with woe" of Lycidas and with the "red or purple flower," as Frye reminds us, "that turns up everywhere in pastoral elegy." Flanders fields are actually as dramatically profuse in bright blue cornflowers as in scarlet poppies. But blue cornflowers have no connection with English pastoral elegiac tradition, and won't do. The same principle determines that of all the birds visible and audible in France, only larks and nightingales shall be selected to be remembered and "used." One noticed and remembers what one has been "coded" - usually by literature or its popular equivalent - to notice and remember. It would be a mistake to imagine that the poppies in Great war writings get there just because they are actually there in the French and Belgian fields. In his sentimental, elegiac the Challenge of the Dead, Stephen Graham produces a book of 176 pages without once noticing a poppy, although he chooses to notice plenty of other indigenous flowers, including roses and cornflowers. We can guess that he omits poppies because their tradition is not one he wants to evoke in his book, the point of which is that survivors should now imitate the sacrifice of the soldiers, who in turn were imitating the sacrifice of Christ. There is something about poppies that is too pagan, ironic, and hedonistic for his purposes. The same principle of literary selection - as opposed to "documentary" or photography - is visible in a poem of the Second War by Herbert Corby. In "Poem" he is projecting a contrast between pastoral serenity and its sinister opposite, the emblems of which are the flowers near his aerodrome and his own metallic airplane. The flowers he selects for this purpose are not any old flowers; they are specifically the two species already freighted with meaning from the earlier war:

The pale wild roses star the banks of green
and poignant poppies startle their fields with red, . . .
I go to the plane among the peaceful clover,
but climbing in the Hampden, shut myself in war.

By the time the troops arrived in France and Belgium, poppies had accumulated a ripe traditional symbolism in English writing, where they had been a staple since Chaucer. Their conventional connotation was the blessing of sleep and oblivion (that is, of a mock-death, greatly to be desired), as in Francis Thompson's "The Poppy" or tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters" (both in the Oxford Book). But during the last quarter of the nineteenth century the poppy began to take on additional connotations, some of which are discreetly glanced at by W.S. Gilbert in Patience (1881). There the aesthete Bunthorne, an exponent of "sentimental passion," is made to sing,

. . . if you walk down Picadilly with a poppy or a lily in your medieval hand,
. . . everyone will say,
As you walk your flowery way,
. . . what a most particularly pure young man this pure young man must be!

Bunthorne's poppy is Papaver orientale, the floppy, scarlet kind. For late Victorians and Edwardians, it was associated specifically with homoerotic passion. In Lord Alfred Douglas's "Two Loves," the allegorical figure who declares that he is "the love that dare not speak its name" is a pale youth whose lips are "red like poppies." For half a century before the fortuitous publicity attained by the poppies of Flanders, this association with homoerotic love had been conventional, in works by Wilde, Douglas, the Victorian painter Simeon Solomon, John Addington Symonds, and countless others. No "poppy" poem or reference emerging from the Great War could wholly shake off that association. When Sassoon notes that "the usual symbolic scarlet poppies lolled over the sides of the communication trench," he is aware, as we must be, that they symbolize something more than shed blood and oblivion.

One of the neatest "turns" in popular symbolism is that by which the paper poppies sold for the benefit of the British Legion on November 11 can be conceived as emblems at once of oblivion and remembrance: a traditional happy oblivion of their agony by the dead, and at the same time an unprecedented mass remembrance of their painful loss by the living. These little paper simulacra come from pastoral elegy (Milton's Arcadian vallets "purple all the ground with vernal flowers"), pass through Victorian male sentimental poetry, flesh themselves out in the actual blossoms of Flanders, and come back to be worn in buttonholes on Remembrance Day. In his "A Short Poem for Armistice Day" Herbert Read is struck by the paper poppy's inability to multiply as well as by its ironic resistance to "fading" and dying. When he sees it as a sad antithesis to something like Milton's fading amaranthus of Lycidas, we are reminded of the war's tradition of ironic wonder that the metal "bramble thicket" is, as R.H. Sauter finds it in his poem "Barbed Wire," "unflowering". Read's poem on the paper poppy enacts the inverse consolation appropriate to an inverse elegy involving inverse flowers.

The most popular poem of the war was John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields," which appeared anonymously in Punch on december 6, 1915. Its poppies are one reason the British Legion chose that symbol of forgetfulness-remembrance, and indeed it could be said that the rigorously regular meter with which the poem introduces the poppies makes them seem already fabricated of wire and paper. It is an interesting poem because it manages to accumulate the maximum number of well-known motifs and images, which it gathers under the aegis of a mellow, if automatic, pastoralism. In its first nine lines it provides such familiar triggers of emotion as these: the red flowers of pastoral elegy; the "crosses" suggestive of calvaries and thus of sacrifice; the sky, especially noticeable from the confines of a trench; the larks bravely singing in apparent critique of man's folly; the binary opposition between the song of the larks and the noise of the guns; the special awareness of dawn and sunset at morning and evening stand-to's; the conception of soldiers as lovers; and the focus on the ironic antithesis between beds and the graves where "now we lie." Not least interesting is the poem's appropriation of the voice-from-the-grave device from such poems of Hardy's as "Channel Firing" and "Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?" and its transformation of that device from a mechanism of irony to one of sentiment:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

So far, so pretty good. But things fall apart two-thirds of the way through as the vulgarities of "Stand Up! Stand Up and Play the Game!" begin to make inroads into the pastoral, and suddenly we have a recruiting poster rhetoric apparently applicable to any war:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.

(The reader who has responded to the poppies and crosses and larks and stand-to's, knowing that they point to some trench referents, will wonder what that "torch" us supposed to correspond to in trench life. It suggests only Emma Lazarus.)

If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

We finally see - and with a shock - what the last six lines really are: they are a propaganda argument - words like vicious and stupid would not seem to go too far - against a negotiated pece; and it could be said that for the purpose, the rhetoric of Sir Henry Newbolt or Horatio Bottomley or the Little Mother is, alas, the appropriate one. But it is grievously out of contact with the symbolism of the first part, which the final image of poppies as sleep-inducers fatally recalls.



Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 246-250.