The red poppy fashion owes its popularity to the Canadian physician Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, who wrote his poem In Flanders Fields as a literary response to the funeral of a fellow soldier who had succumbed in the Second Battle of Ypres, in 1915. In the poem, the blowing red poppies mark the remnant of the soulless corpses belonging to the fallen soldiers.
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.
(John McCrae, In Flanders Fields)
Since the 1920’s, In Flanders Fields has been recognized as the literary creation which triggered the fashion of the Red Poppy, a tributary clothing item, wore in the remembrance of the ones lost in the bloodiest war in the entire history. Furthermore, as periods of time evolved, the red poppy symbol came to be used as a mourning symbol for the people who died during every war ever since, and nowadays, the mere mentioning of the reddish flower, evokes the image of a bloody battlefield.
According to an on-line debate forwarded by The Independent, the red poppy symbol may have become preposterous. Through their dispraising articles on the matter, writers Robert Fisk and Lindsey German definitely fit the category of those in disagreement with such a fashionable display of an utmost personal and mournful feeling. What is more, in her latest article entitled Poppy Appeal 2014: This is why I won’t be wearing a red poppy this year, Lindsey German hints at the idea that contemporary usage of the appreciative red poppy has shifted its symbolism from the deceased heroes to the idea of war itself. Presumably, high-ranked institutions, such as the government and the military, desire to broadcast to the masses a subliminal message, not of the past wars and suffering, but of the ones which are on the brink of blasting.
According to the tradition, the red poppy is still worn on the clothes of men and women in parts of the former British Empire the weeks prior to Remembrance Day. Nonetheless, written manifests of journalists such as Robert Fisk (whose father has been a victim of the war) speak the mind of the crowd, of an overly fed population with war crimes, nuclear bombing and bereavement.
The white poppy is the reversed red poppy, as its color symbolizes purity and peace, the lark in John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields, with reference to the Biblical Deluge followed by the appearance of a white dove carrying an olive branch in its beak. A fictional war between the two parties (White versus Red) must have as winner the non-colored poppy, not because of its deepest symbolism, but because of the ability of humans to appeal to their humanity.