* Of your right to protect cowards and deserters
* Of your right to protest
* Of your right to wear a white poppy
Rex Murphy: Poppies show our regret at war’s horrors, not our love for it
Nathan Denette for National Post
In the tradition of Western poetry, flowers and flower imagery are inevitably associated with mortality. “Man is in love, and loves what vanishes,” is Yeats’ terse summary of our human condition. Nothing captures the bittersweet brevity, the “vanishingness” or our estate, better than the heart-stopping beauty and simultaneous fleetingness of flowers in bloom.
The gathering of flowers is itself a most enduring symbol of human mortality — we are “gathered” by accident, illness, war or, finally, time. Milton made the comparison explicit when he wrote of how fair “Proserpine, gathering flowers/ Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis was gathered.” Read More »
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