The Poppy and the Pride of Death: Interpretations on a Famous War Poem

Poppy Field in a Hollow near Giverny by Claude Monet

"Poppies have long been used as a symbol of sleep, peace, and death: sleep because of the opium extracted from them, and death because of the common blood-red color of the red poppy in particular. In Greek and Roman myths, poppies were used as offerings to the dead." [1]

"Another candidate for the psychoactive drug is an opioid derived from the poppy. The cult of the goddess Demeter may have brought the poppy from Crete to Eleusis; it is certain that opium was produced in Crete." [2]

References

[1] L. Frank Baum, Michael Patrick Hearn, The Annotated Wizard of Oz, p. 173

[2] Karl Kerenyi.Dionysos.Archetypal image of indestructible life.p 24

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.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
   The torch; be yours to hold it high.
   If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
         In Flanders fields. [John McCrae]

The above poem, written by John McCrae, is one of the important war poems in history. Today, it is read aloud by veterans at remembrance ceremonies with solemn intention. The symbol and metaphor poppy, here depicted, is especially relevant for the topic of war. 

The poppy symbolizes death. "In Flander's Fields the poppies blow" would then mean that in Flander's Fields, the dead sleep in peace. The second line further supports this. The last two lines, "We shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flander's Fields" emphasizes the simple metaphor of the poppy as a symbol of eternal rest, however, in this sense, the poem transcends symbolic import and represents the pride of the soldier as immortal, and sleepless in constant struggle. This is a poem to incite emotion for the dead, and where we might once believe they lay in respite from worldly cause, we are wrong. So the poem is a call to action, "Take up your quarrel with the foe". 

Further, it symbolizes how the poppy is a metaphor for the illusory nature of war, as seen from outside the veteran perspective. It uniquely distinguishes the veteran, whether alive or dead, as having an eternal place in the battlegrounds and in the generations of youth to follow. The poppy symbolizes our ignorance as non-military, as we remember the soldiers who fight on. 

And so, in the land of poppies, Afghanistan, the longest war in U.S. history wages on. Remembrance, in the metaphor of the poppy, can also fog our vision of the dead, and of their eternal struggle for rebirth in the fields where men are laid low. 

Peace author Arthur Clark once said the poppy symbolizes all who die in war, not just the soldiers of one's own nation, but every victim of war, every innocent child, mother, elder, the destroyed lives and communities. The poppy is the drug of pride, and like all drugs, while instilling disillusionment, it reveals truths of the human condition. 

_________

The inborn drug of sleep has yet to bear new visions fruitful and enduring. I travel eastward towards the desolate earth, and find matchless beauty in the serene quiet of petrified earth, the resonance of death lingers like a gentle breeze.  

Westward! (RK)

Son of the Brown Earth (RK)

Hiker's Meadow (RK)

To The Mountaintop! (RK)

The Canyon Calls Me Forth (RK)

__________

An untouched grand awe
Landed finally to rest beside the sickening mildew

Mulch-pressed nude lakes
Praised unto the natural moon

Lowering close over the beached horizon
A thirteenth name

Pleasing those raised on the island to visit their blood
Despite being insane

A malformed genetic waste
Purchasing birth

Towering over the healthy dead, grovelling
Ensnared by the angry temptress who walks entombed in mind

And spiritually blessed beyond our mundane knowledge,
She treasures the feminine life

...

To put to death philosophy, and cursed forms of common language
Now replaced with magic and divinity

Inert
Enough to overact above the spilled heights

Grandiose unity
Frontiersmen who bite at raw flesh and faint under the jeering of native rumblings

In the overcast dusk of Western humanity
Fallen alas to the bitter womb of civilization

And the crass membrane stew of our unalienable forebears
Freaking us out

Into stomachs without mouths
To feed on the juice of the horned phantom

And only lick from inside
The wounds stinging our nameless pride

excerpts from "Untouched Grande Awe"

Free Association Beyond Symbols: The Interpretive Art of Freud

The Dream of Prisoners by Moritz von Schwind
(appears in Freud's 1920 publication)

"Interpretation based on a knowledge of symbols is not a technique that can replace the associative technique, or even compare with it." Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. p. 124

See my earlier post, The Dark Ages Revivified by the Colour of Welsh Dream-Lore for an intuitive lead into this analytical reasoning on the act of interpretation, as confirmed by Freud.

_________

Highway travails, backseat blues, the wrested grapple on leathered frowns presses my skull to the glass with thinly worn agreement with current circumstance, transitory. I pipe up, “Now! I need a bath!” The car halts at a gated stopover, wherein curious attendees ask for a fee. The lockjaw tension spills out into an arts fiesta of European nostalgia. 

The Rose, or the Artist's Journey by Moritz von Schwind

I call out to the crowd, “Now! I have a poem!” I begin muttering, unconfident to truly belt out the words, poorly edited and written with fine ink on a magazine page. The people in the room simply continue on, unalloyed with the anti-climactic triumph of my ever- softening voice. As I saunter outside, away from the dizzying crowd, drunk on their high horse of serendipitous camaraderie, I wade in hollow memory. 

Apparition in the Woods by Moritz von Schwind

Repeating two names, Rem and Rom, as nicknames to the famed feral twins of classical Roman fate. Unnerved by the mysterious blank, open backdrop of mental awareness rusting and pasted over with tasteless eyes, I reason and devise a new way. Alone, into the darkest, thickest patch of forest, I tread the unknowable, pathless, fearless and out of mind, out of time.  

________

Following the wave’s break
Chilling the surf in its open, living mind

Shedding tears
Upside into the sky’s unbroken cavity

When fish jump
And break surface of mental clarity with life’s untamed spontaneity,

When life emerges
And takes of its observant few what prophecies are foretold by nature

...

To die the impatient death of youth
And brush past the envisioned self

Struggling to go together with soul
To the summit of human glory

- excerpt from "Borrowed from the Ancients"

Deathly Assumption of the Premodern Morpheus

Morpheus by Jean-Bernard Restout

The God, uneasy 'till he slept again,
Resolv'd at once to rid himself of pain;
And, tho' against his custom, call'd aloud,
Exciting Morpheus from the sleepy crowd:
Morpheus, of all his numerous train, express'd
The shape of man, and imitated best;
The walk, the words, the gesture could supply,
The habit mimick, and the mein bely;
Plays well, but all his action is confin'd,
Extending not beyond our human kind.

From Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book XI (Source) 

Death and sleep, the fading plea of waking form, dissipating under the thin sheets of human comfort, forlorn, the pain of reality is a realization, that death's blood stains the dying hand. 

________

The creaking wood of the log cabin breeds an authentic woodsy order. Inklings and whisperings from the unheard Northern ecology brew spindly mycelium waves into the tragic human desolation, a stolid break from the bitter taste of city life. 

An original inhabitant, with less design for the transitory fading of desire, hides in groves and pains with the aftermath of winter in this warming escape. Unintentional, with drab face, his emotive instances are bare with unknowable sorrow. The rain burns over the frayed wick of lightless trunks under the whistling canopy. 

He has the air of a murderer, more a serial killer. Thin and over-confident, he swaggers into a common room, his flesh woven in knots, gnarled eyes penetrate the pointed vulnerability of my female companion. The tense noose of our isolation bespeaks unforeseen warning. One night, he feeds.

Gathering my things, a fright of blearing raw insanity, my computers, my bags, the endless compartments within compartments filled with this or that, yet my Love is slaughtered in the white heat of this wooden homicidal mystery. I hear his steps and free myself from the burden of automobile and everything I own, possessing only the random trappings of a turning mind. 

I fall, retching in a golden mud, into a hole of wonder, the driven names sputter and churn in this earthen stomach, heaving and ingesting my whereabouts in a timetable of eternity. Blinking water, dripping in the metallic soil, spurns an awakening as I peer into the soft light of the tunnelling ahead, beckoning me to further escape. The wishy-washy sounds pander in my mind with noxious will. 

A funnel of heat presses its ugly scent into my eyes, as I sink ever deeper through a new hole, fainting with near-death experience, dropped beside a bus. Eagerly, a host of newcomers, young as myself, board the bus with all their things. Stupefied, lost faces daydream an unsayable nightmare, their hollow eyes mirror my own mourning. We’re off to Egypt, to face the sun of the age. 

_______

Murder

"To see murder committed in your dreams, foretells much sorrow arising from the misdeeds of others. Affair will assume dullness. Violent deaths will come under your notice...If you are the eyewitness to a murder this is also a warning, but, one that is alerting you to possible changes in your life that you will not like unless you practice self control and not expect others to order the situation for you." (iDream)

_______

roaming to sacrifice

memories
and the aftermath of a wordless crisis,
vagaries of mind bound by geographic boom
into the obscured continental pole,
driven
estranged to unknown homes,
sacrificed to roaming

Lafcadio Hearn's Akinosuke and the Fleeting Entomology of Youth

Illustration from the original edition

"Akinosuke must have been dreaming," one of them exclaimed, with a laugh. "What did you see, Akinosuke, that was strange?"

Then Akinosuke told his dream,--that dream of three-and-twenty years' sojourn in the realm of Tokoyo, in the island of Raishu;--and they were astonished, because he had really slept for no more than a few minutes."

- excerpt from The Dream of Akinosuke, as compiled in Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

In the Japanese dream narrative recorded and analyzed by Lafcadio Hearn, based in the folklore of Japan, the symbology of insects, which reflect the ephemeral substance of dream as the unconscious imagination, are here abundantly espoused as creative interpretations of archetypal imagery (Butterflies, Mosquitos, and Ants).

Wonder, the life of an insect, so short, from a human mind. Yet with the indiscernible speed of buzzing flight, an eternal instant, witnessed of countless eyes.

(Currently listening to Somei Satoh)

_______

Backstage, a slight sepia-tone monochrome corridor splits into a labyrinth of doorways. An old acquaintance meets me behind a curtain, in the shadowy nook. “Oh! How are you?” Proudly delighted to have us meet onstage, he announces his part, “This is the play of Arthur.” With equal candor to his showy façade of shiny outlook, I greet him kindly, “That is great!” I walk past, returning to my disoriented grumbling, a burdened mug, stupefied with untenable sorrow. In an underground room, coldly lit with dusty spotlights, a group of Japanese youth greet me with strong affirmation, welcoming and comfortable in their sturdy countenance, an open sound of impromptu community breeds equal recognition for all present, dicing cards and stringing their hats to the unblinking mold of unspoken friendship. One, slightly overweight, fiddles with an obsolete USB converter. Blowing through it, he creates tones of a flute. Placing a wooden object with holes and a plate full of water, he begins to shape harmonies and effervescent rhythms with a strong windpipe coloration. His instrumental play continues to the delight of us all as he sits under a strong light, entertaining with jazz intonation amid the subdued betting ruckus of bargained camaraderie. One man at the cards table looks me straight in the eye with clear intention, a warm regard filters through the depth of his unwavering eyes as he hands me a cloudy glass of thin white water. “Would you like some rice water?” He asks quietly. “I’ve heard of rice milk!” I respond, accepting with spry respect.   

_______

Rice

"Rice is good to see in dreams, as it foretells success and warm friendships...To eat it signifies happiness and domestic content. To see it mixed with dirt or otherwise impure, denotes sickness and separation from friends...Dreaming about rice means good luck and happy times are coming." (iDream)

Insects

"Insects in a dream always represent obstacles that you must overcome to reach your goals...Insects also represent excessive worry over certain things, meditate to find out what they might mean to you by using all the symbols in your dream for reference." (iDream) 

_______

oh dreamer in disguise!
who wakes with a call vocalized
from towers disappearing and weary
in the first morning light,

who shocked entranced gazers
pouring pupils over their single-haired tips, fragmented,
reflecting a statue's burned relics, encased in antiquity

surviving the past with trickery in the momentary revelation
from an onlooking sage,
her brown-eyed ghost close above her shoulders,
sunken and twisting with every step
into the shrinking abyss alleyway.

a life written as graffiti
from talented, distended arms
working magic into the obsolete concrete,
courageous youth, who wars
over books and trivia for a mathematical applause
within their minds,
the build up,
cornering her feline sense

in a mundane yet sacrificial wail to another day,
a day after dead thoughts reinvigorate the mind
with careless hauntings that cry and stutter a storm,
made in blood and worn as a headdress
to the laughing and cruel butterfly Asian trust,
in a token object,
insignia drawn with fingernail accuracy

as a tattoo beneath the skin,
warning in wordless heed
to beware for the introspective desire,
most inner and yet most awake,
as host to the world's untamed fire,
a prehistoric urge,
to look above,
walking away from the estranged bellowing
hidden deep inside,
a union with touch,
spirit's shudder
listening to the walled moods that hallow

- excerpt from "misbegotten souls"

Phillis Wheatley, Awakened Mother of the Free Word

Phillis Wheatley by Unknown

Say what is sleep? and dreams how passing strange!

When action ceases, and ideas range
Licentious and unbounded o'er the plains,
Where Fancy's queen in giddy triumph reigns.

Hear in soft strains the dreaming lover sigh
To a kind fair, or rave in jealousy;
On pleasure now, and now on vengeance bent,
The lab'ring passions struggle for a vent.

What pow'r, O man! thy reason then restores,
So long suspended in nocturnal hours?

What secret hand returns the mental train,
And gives improv'd thine active pow'rs again?

From thee, O man, what gratitude should rise!

And, when from balmy sleep thou op'st thine eyes,
Let thy first thoughts be praises to the skies.

Excerpt from "Thoughts on the WORKS of PROVIDENCE." by Phillis Wheatley (Source)

Phillis Wheatley: "the first African-American poet, and the first African-American woman to publish her writing." (Wikipedia). Watch a great reading of one of my favourites, "Hymn to the Evening."

________

The grasses spell warm delightful, cracked insect green coloration, the chalky incompleteness in the waving eye of nature stares back with full recognition, restitution with human presence. Eagerly, I walk through the high rushes, stung with the tail end of a long forgetful period of mourning. The air fills my nostrils with intense humidity. An overwhelming lushness gravitates towards my brain. All the follicles from the plant world betray my unaware scents with awakening need. Aromatic, I speed through the vibrant, near-neon lime-green touches and find my way to a log cabin under the gorgeous density of a well-pollinated atmosphere, bred for the mind’s eye to pierce through to planetary secrets untold. 

Penniless, I am a drifter of smiles, a careless frame, basking in the gathering of those my age. Who do I see? I am at a loss. 

My mother! Young in her prime, she takes pity on my beleaguered state, handing me a Canadian ten-dollar bill in front of a lunch stand. The light mountain air feeds our intoxicated bliss with an embracing strength unknown in normal life, there is a silent energy about, allowing us to traverse the freedoms abreast in this long-sought after hollow of meadow and cloudless rays. I brim over with gladness, alive at once, with my friend and mother. Holding her in the sunshine womb of celestial pride, we walk through the silky meadow, renewed. Attaining the final vision, before the gully drops off the edge of a nearby cliff, I turn around and follow the nightly smoke of fellow friends, preparing for parties in the aftermath of youth, meanwhile, my mother stays behind, patiently awaiting my return, at the precipice of subterranean mystery.

_______

Mother

"The general image of 'mother' in a dream may symbolize a variety of feelings and ideas: caring, nurturing, love, acceptance, hard work, sacrifice, martyrdom, etc. The mother in your dream could also represent the 'collective unconscious,' the source of the 'water of life,' and the yin. Carl Jung suggests that women in dreams represent the collective unconscious and men the collective consciousness. Thus, the woman is that force, or current, inside of you that nudges you on and inspires you. It is your intuition and knowledge that is not necessarily attached to words."(iDream)

_______

in the deep silent tragic night,
blizzard disarray and the electric blankness
recedes throughout our psychic presence

with ethereal dismay,
morbid as the desert solitaire,
of rose-laden heights

excerpt from "interpretive direction"

Engineering the Unconscious

“…there exists a barrier in you, all our minds, which prevents these hidden and unwelcome impulses of the unconscious from emerging.” (Dr. Ernest Jones) 

“…the very idea of examining and analyzing one’s inner feelings was a threat to their absolute control.”

“By analyzing dreams and free association he had unearthed, he said, powerful sexual and aggressive forces which were the remnants of our animal past. Feelings we repressed because they were too dangerous.”

“If human beings were driven by unconscious irrational forces than it was necessary to rethink democracy.” 

- from the film, "The Century of the Self" (Part One on YouTube)

________

We wait aimlessly. The school cafeteria transforms into the living room at my grandparent’s house. The light brown rug gives off a beige boredom, as I sit amongst friends and family, waiting, so patiently, as if for the return of Christ. Eating is drudgery. There is an unlikely foment of pleasing silence about, precipitated by my power-hungry relatives. I have had enough. I clasp my hands and in a manner to mock Christian prayer, I bowl over carelessly in front of my father and uncle. “Christmas is within you!” I say to them with lifted humor. They smile with vagrant attention as my grandmother proceeds to welcome me to sleep downstairs. As I take up her offer, the entire upstairs rumbles with festivity. Smoke pours in dreamily as brass instruments are uncased and steamed with the strong breath of celebratory music. “Is it time?” I ponder, wistfully.

________

Christmas

"Symbolizes family togetherness, reunions and celebration. It is also representative of new beginnings and fresh starts." (iDream)

________

There are four deities.
Each represents a characteristic prevalent in creatures, stones, places, and thoughts.

Creatures are animals, plants, water and air.
Stones are celestial bodies, crystals and money.
Places are meaning, stories, songs and art.
Thoughts are actions which emanate from the center of being, the heart.

Each of the four deities has an age,
and each has a name with which it is remembered
by People.

The first deity is called,
Haumah; Nation,
the second is
Hakhalah; Community,
the third is
Mishpachah; Family,
and the fourth is,
Aahtzmi; Self.

Today, we are in the age of Aahtzmi.

- excerpt from "Deadly Vision Part I"

Chinese Workers Migrate To Smaller Dreams

"Dreams cannot be realized, but everyone has a dream, isn't it? Let's not talk about big dreams, just small ones." - Chinese migrant worker at Foxconn

_________

The overcast sky is doomful and apocalyptic in its bitter majesty. The obscurity is cutting and breaks down the soul, memory vanishes at every instant under its featureless gaze. Intricate sky-trains run through the horizon and above the city outskirts, buildings are heavy with the shadow of exceeding industrial progress. Underneath the mastery of technologic ingenuity, residencies are ramshackle with a past stunted by mysterious misdirection. This is Xi’an, the ancient capital of China, reduced to a highway market under the unceasing black smog gathering above. On a dim street, I follow an acquaintance into his apartment. I reminisce on my time living in the dizzying neglect-ridden suburbs of Cairo, where once a Southern Sudanese lady told me I was tough for living there! I enter the swelling door, busted at the edges. The room is drab, yet with hard-won charm. My friend appears with the build of a martial arts practitioner. He welcomes me eagerly to enjoy his space as he exits. I am stricken with fear in this unsure, foreign nightmare. A closet door then opens, revealing a neighbor’s apartment. A man, half in pajamas, greets me courteously and comforts my anxiety with friendly exchanges. I am left to a broken television, indiscernible Chinese books and near-broken furniture. 

_________

Train

"To see a moving train in your dreams means you will soon have reason to make a journey...Freud said that the train is usually a phallic symbol and that a train going through a tunnel represents intercourse...Jung though that the train ride represented the way a person moves and behaves just like everyone else and that you the dreamer may be striving for wholeness."

_________

spurious blame...the corridor towards bristling american fame.
and glum, rock-stopping angelic veins

bellowing green mud into a ghastly, shattered dome
factory cone
rummaging into the asshole
wounded entrances of el-hind museum
embellishments veering off the possible pathway
sworn to ruining

nursed to zero wanting
defiled
rambling on the cursed block

nomad goal
always westerniz'd
to mean not-a-thing!

crazy intellect
brine
unfeeling as the dreaming vedic horse
that destroys

cruel menacing peace
in the morbid fashions of contemporary lividity

...

“seeded sickness,
martyr'd
in the glass caverns of shap'd reckoning
calling forward a landless vanishing
as the finished evocations of dynastic slavery trains the eyes
of a rat-fish
bestial love”

“groping for home,
just say...
what there is to not say...
give me a thinn'd breach of time and place,
wake me from the driveling selflessly thrash'd disorder
or invite emotional nothing,
and non-thinking
indulgent visitations."

the trunk swirld for a banish'd world
created from the nearly unmade

a timeless ocean of intent,
bespoken with visceral imagining

the spontaneous friend, as nonhuman entity
alleviating the pinkish, boring stress
coarse as a matchstick
curved with lint from a monotonous parasite of recycled minuteness.

- excerpts from "Spurious Blame"