The red field poppy is one of the most ephemeral flowers there is. Its petals, thin as paper, fall at the first breeze; the flower lasts a few days. Yet this fragile flower has become one of the most powerful symbols of the Western tradition, tied to two opposite and complementary experiences: the sleep that makes us forget and the remembrance that must not die out.
The flower of Sleep
In Greek mythology the poppy belongs to Hypnos, Sleep, twin brother of Thanatos, Death. Ancient depictions often show the god holding poppy heads, or pouring sleep from a horn. Hypnos's son, Morpheus, is the god who gives shape to dreams.
Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, describes the home of Sleep: a cave in the land of the Cimmerians, where the light of the sun never reaches. Before the entrance poppies grow in abundance, along with countless herbs, from which Night gathers sleep to scatter over the earth. No sound is heard, no cock crows, no dog barks: all is silence.
Sleep and death
The closeness of Hypnos and Thanatos says much about the symbol. For the ancients sleep was a small death, and death a sleep with no waking. The poppy stands on this threshold: it is the flower that accompanies the passage from waking to darkness, from consciousness to oblivion.
The river Lethe, which in the world of the dead erases the memory of souls, flowed, according to some traditions, right beside the cave of Sleep. Oblivion and poppy call to each other.
Demeter and the poppy
The poppy grows wild in fields of grain, mingled with the ears of wheat. It is no surprise, then, that it was associated with Demeter, goddess of the harvest, and with her Roman counterpart Ceres. In ancient images the goddess often holds ears of grain and poppy heads together.
A mythical account tells that Demeter, desperate at the abduction of her daughter Persephone, found in the poppy the sleep that gave her respite from grief. In this reading the poppy represents the suspension of suffering, the rest needed before taking up the path again. Its seed-filled heads also recall the fertility of the earth.
Tarquin's tall poppies
Livy tells a famous episode of archaic Roman history. Sextus, son of King Tarquin the Proud, had seized power in the city of Gabii and sent a messenger to his father for advice. The king, without answering in words, walked in his garden and with a stick struck off the heads of the tallest poppies. The messenger reported the gesture, and Sextus understood: he was to eliminate the most prominent citizens.
From this story comes the expression, widespread especially in the English-speaking world, of "tall poppy syndrome", the tendency to strike down whoever rises above the rest. The poppy thus also becomes a symbol of the vulnerability of excellence.
The poppy of remembrance
In the twentieth century the poppy acquired a new and very powerful meaning. During the First World War, on the battlefields of Flanders torn up by fighting, poppies bloomed in great numbers. The Canadian military doctor John McCrae wrote the poem In Flanders Fields in 1915, which opens with the image of poppies growing among the crosses.
Since then the red poppy has become, in many countries, the symbol of remembrance for those fallen in war. It is a significant reversal: the flower of oblivion becomes the flower of memory. The red of the petals recalls the blood shed, the flower's fragility the brevity of life.
Symbolic reading
Maestro Cornelio stresses that the poppy teaches us to hold together two movements of the soul: the ability to let go, to rest, to forget what wounds, and the duty to remember what must not be lost.
| Context | Meaning of the poppy |
|---|---|
| Hypnos and Morpheus | Sleep, dream, the threshold of night |
| Lethe and oblivion | Forgetting, suspension |
| Demeter | Rest from grief, fertility |
| Tarquin | Vulnerability of those who stand out |
| Flanders | Remembrance of the fallen |
In short
- The poppy was the flower of Hypnos, Sleep, brother of Death.
- Ovid places poppies before the silent cave of Sleep.
- It grows among the grain and was associated with Demeter and Ceres.
- Tarquin's gesture with the tall poppies became proverbial.
- After the First World War it became the flower of remembrance for the fallen.
