Poppies to remember

Harry Scherer
Class of 2022

(5/2021) "If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields."

These three lines complete the 1915 John McCrae poem entitled "In Flanders Fields." This poem is one which valorizes courage, patriotism, and self-sacrifice. Lieutenant McCrae wrote it as a remembrance of the British soldiers who died in World War I. At the very least, the conclusion of the poem demands remembrance and reverence; for the particularly zealous, it requires action.

For an education professor at the University of Georgia, this call to action was unavoidable. Moina Belle Michael, now affectionately known as "The Poppy Lady," felt called to honor her fallen brothers and instituted a nationwide campaign to popularize the use of poppies as a symbol of gratitude for those who died in battle. The campaign was one of both mental and material benefit; in addition to remembering those who died in battle, the sale of the poppies brought financial relief to soldiers and their families. Michael’s goal was one intent on strengthening a certain social memory and practically providing for those who can be so easily forgotten.

A more often forgotten aspect of her movement was a poem that she wrote as a complementary response to McCrae’s. In 1918, she said in her poem "We Shall Keep the Faith", "We cherish, too, the poppy red / That grows on fields / where valor led; / It seems to signal to the skies / That blood of heroes never dies." These lines answer the inevitable question of "why poppies?" We could safely point to a suggestion of convenience; McCrae, and Michael after him, focused on the poppy because that is the flower that grows on the field where fallen soldiers lay. On a deeper, figurative level, Michael points out that the crimson red of the poppy flower signifies the blood pouring from the lifeless bodies formed by courageous souls. The flower in itself, though, is strangely one of hope. The vibrant color reflects off of the sun and the thin petals gracefully fold into one another.

Both McCrae and Michael recognized that soldiers saw these peaceful flowers sitting and growing silently as the world around them fought in frenzied anxiety. The poppies signify the refreshing, but at times dreadful, contrast between theory and practice, ideal and iniquity. It is certainly a fitting poetical tool to identify the poppy, a beautiful manifestation of the natural world, as a manifestation of what could be as opposed to the unnatural brutalities of war.

Furthermore, the poppy physicalizes the memory of those who have fallen before us in a way that some other plain object cannot. The flower serves as a catalyst to memory, which in itself is a debt of gratitude to those who have died for our sake. Memory, as a faculty of the intellect, aids us in bringing to life something that has passed. By remembering someone or something, we are identifying that person or thing as existing; if it does not exist, we could not remember it. For example, when we recall our first car, even if the vehicle was demolished into a sheet of metal decades ago, the form of the car still exists, at least insofar as it exists in our memory. While the physical matter of the car no longer exists in time, the form of the car exists.

The same is the case, in a much more profound and human sense, with those who have fallen in battle. While the matter of their bodies is lifeless and no longer inhabits their soul, the form of the person, the person still exists spiritually. To deny this would be to accept annihilation as the fate of human persons at death, which on its own is certainly a depressing theory. The poppy is a recognition of all of this as true; while anxiety hung over the hearts of men as they fought in battle and cared so much about returning home to their families, the poppy swung back and forth in the wind without care to human ignorance and shortsightedness.

The poppy also surely serves a social tool that encourages discussion among family members and friends about the memory of their loved one lost in battle. The social dimension of memory seems to be incredibly important because it is this social engagement with memories of the past that allows for a crystallization and clarification of their content. It is certainly a natural human desire to share grief, slowly and socially. The verbalization of memories allows for the one sharing to develop the memory from a mental reality to a verbal one and the one hearing it from a possible one to an audible and certain one. Sharing memories is an act of trust and something that should be encouraged by any community interested in exposing and mutually understanding the weaknesses of its members for the sake of personal and corporate strength. The notion of strength through weakness seems to be an overly used but poorly understood metric of development; if a building is weak, the inhabitants want to know everything that is weak about it so that the weaknesses can be recognized, addressed and reformed. The same is the case with persons and communities, especially bodies that are enduring a period of trauma in common. That which causes weakness, especially the physical and mental weakness that can come from the loss of a loved one from war, deserves to be shared with those in the griever’s community; a refusal to do so, especially for a long period of time, could understandably come from a refusal to recognize reality as it is.

While death and grief are sorely parts of life itself, the poppy sways in the air, drawing searching souls closer to an embrace of loss as something dreadful but necessary. The poppy is a figure of solidarity, the same image gazed upon by the brave in battle and those who promise to keep the faith.

Read other articles by Harry Scherer