A perfect example of how we see what we are conditioned to see:
We may assume poppies are associated with fallen soldiers in World War I because they are red, like blood.
Yes, and roses too--lots of these in WWI English literature.
And Thomas Hardy used fuschia hanging "red by the door" to talk about a soldier's death.
And DH Lawrence, lilies, "flat red, with a million petals."
And red geraniums.
Poppies, writes Paul Fusell in The Great War and Modern Memory, are "even more complicated and interesting" than those flowers.
Think---what else are poppies?
They are the source of opium.
"Their conventional connotation was the blessing of sleep and oblivion."
Further, and I had no idea of this,
"For the late Victorians and Edwardians [that is, immediately pre-WWI], the poppy is associated specifically with homoerotic passion. In Lord Alfred Douglas's 'Two Loves,' the allegorical figure who declares he is 'the love that dare not speak its name' is a pale youth whose lips are 'red like poppies'."(Lord Alfred Douglas was Bosie, Oscar Wilde's lover.)
Fussell points out that John McCrae's "In Flander's Fields" [...the poppies blow]––the WWI poem most associated with poppies––also expresses "the conception of soldiers as lovers":
"We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived… Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.”
So, there we go.
Nothing is just one thing. Certainly not poppies.
Not all poppies are opium poppies, certainly not the orange Californian poppies seen here and not the red Flanders poppies either. The opium ones are the Asian poppies with the rounded grey calyx and frilled pink petals. I'm fairly sure on this. Here in Australia it is illegal to grow that type in a home garden.
ReplyDeleteYes, Penny Cooper pointed that out too, and wanted to write a whole blog about it. :)
ReplyDeleteBut the point was that that's their SYMBOLIC role in British literature--that's what the book is about--literature and WWI.
--Frex = Fresca