Why do we Wear Remembrance Poppies?
The Importance of the Poppy to Remembering World War 1 History
Nov 2, 2009
The world's very first Remembrance Day was held in November 1921, three years after the end of World War One in which it is estimated between twenty and forty million people died. The occasion has been remembered annually every year since and is now used to mourn the dead from the Second World War too.
With the death of Britain's last WW1 survivor Harry Patch earlier this year, celebrating the dead of both World Wars has become increasingly important. But the flower everyone has worn on Remembrance Day and the approach to it for the last seventy-eight years remains an enigma to many: why was the poppy chosen as a symbol of WW1 above anything else?
In Flanders Fields
Flanders in Belgium saw some of the most intense fighting in WW1 and was transformed between 1914 and 1918 from one of the loveliest areas of Northern Europe into a scene of devastation, mud and the graves of men who gave their lives to the war.
But in the midst of the atrocities, every year without fail the poppies would bloom on the battle fields. There are good reasons why this was the case. Poppies are resiliant flowers. They are also flowers which only grow after the soil in which their seeds are buried becomes disturbed. The continual disruption of a war being fought on the soil thus encouraged their growth.
Poppies became adopted as a sign of life and hope for those fighting. The Canadian doctor John McCrae who witnessed much of the fighting in WW1 first hand, penned a poem on this contrast between the scenes of dead and dying and the presence of this blood-red flower. The poem, In Flanders Fields, became symbolic of the war effort and poppies are integrally associated with it:
"In Flanders Field the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row."
We Shall Keep the Faith by Moira Michael
The American poet Moira Michael was so moved by McCrae's poem that she wrote a response in which she promised to wear the poppy as a way of remembering the terrible war. Verse three of the poem begins:
"We cherish too the Poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led."
And verse four of the poem contains the lines:
And now the torch and poppy red
We wear in honour of our dead."
Symbol of the Poppy
The poppy became a symbol of remembering the World Wars because of McCrae and Michael but it is important to also remember that it was a powerful metaphor in their own right that people wear poppies on Remembrance Day. In a land of brown mud and white crosses to mark graves, in the world war the presence of the red poppies must have been vivid and harrowing to all who saw them.
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