Members of the Co-operative Womens Guild laying a wreath of white poppies at the Cenotaph Armistice Day 1937īut we could still keep the red poppy, if we wished, only this time the one Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918) picked from a parapet to “stick behind my ear” in “ Break of Day in the Trenches.” In Fussell’s opinion “the greatest poem of the war,” its “loose but accurate emotional cadences” – eschewing all regimentation of meter (or thought) – “acutely” anticipate the modern verse of, in particular, T.S. In 1933, the Women’s Cooperative Guild in the UK courageously produced a white ‘peace poppy’ to counter the sublimation of slaughter affected by red poppy ritualism and since 1936, the Peace Pledge Union has distributed white poppies across Britain and beyond. Great death has made all his for evermore. Perceive one face that you loved heretofore, Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you … Nor honor.” For just as “it is easy to be dead,” it is easy to forget the real and only ‘victor’ of the War – “Give them not praise,” Sorley implores: “Nor tears. Say not soft things as other men have said, When you see millions of the mouthless deadĪcross your dreams in pale battalions go, If Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) – whose subject was “the pity of war” – was our alternate-universe McCrae, perhaps instead of cheering fly-overs and gun-salutes we’d recoil from “the monstrous anger of the guns” and “the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle” brutally punctuating his “ Anthem for Doomed Youth.” If we had adopted Sassoon (1886-1967) as our poet laureate of remembrance, instead of the poppy we’d have to confront (in the poem “ To His Dead Body“) the “red-faced father God who lit your mind.” And if we picked the lesser-known Charles Sorley – dead at 20 the year McCrae penned his ‘immortal’ lines – we would have these culturally subversive ‘orders’ to follow, found scribbled in pencil in his uniform: It is an interesting exercise to ask what symbols might have been picked from the works of the major war poets, to serve the cause of an authentic, critical remembrance refusing to lump all wars, warriors and causes into the same fundraising (and recruitment-tool) basket. In his landmark study The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), American critic (and WW2 veteran) Paul Fussell describes his “shock” at fully registering “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 peace.” As for the first nine lines, “the rigorously regular meter with which the poem introduces” the flesh-and-blood flowers – “In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row” – “makes them seem already fabricated of wire and paper.”įussell defends his attack – certainly vicious, but far from stupid – by insisting: “I have not broken this butterfly on a wheel for no reason,” but rather to expose its pernicious superficiality, fuel to sustain associated clichés (“The Glorious Dead”) and unexamined claims (“They Died So We Could Be Free”) acting more to induce false memories than inspire a true reckoning with what British Great War poet Siegfried Sassoon called “the world’s worst wound.” Processed and mass-produced, the poppy soon became opium, an hallucinogenic annual ‘high’ of national pride and hero-worship. McCrae died, aged 46, of Spanish flu – spread worldwide by the War – in 1918, three years after his call for the carnage to continue was published in, appropriately, Punch magazine: The idea of selling artificial poppies to support the millions of Allied veterans, and honor the millions of Allied war dead, was that of Anna Guérin, “The Poppy Lady from France,” herself inspired by what is surely the most influential minor poem ever written, “ In Flanders Fields” by the Canadian army doctor John McCrae.
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