Poppies: the grief that happens at home, three days early

Why would a country bury a soldier on purpose without knowing who he was? It sounds like a mistake, as if nobody could find a name. On the eleventh of November, nineteen twenty, Britain buried one unidentified soldier in Westminster Abbey. He was chosen from several bodies nobody could name, so that any family with a missing son could believe the grave might be his. The not knowing was the point. Jane Weir's poem Poppies is about a mother and a son who has gone, and it never goes near the battlefield. Her grief stays at a front door, and on a hill.

Poppies is still in copyright, so this video quotes short pieces of it; have the anthology open if you can. A mother is speaking, and the you she speaks to is her son. It begins "Three days before Armistice Sunday", the day the country remembers its war dead. The poem starts beside the public ceremony, and then never attends it. Before he leaves, she pins a poppy on him: "I pinned one onto your lapel". The petals are "spasms of paper red", so the symbol of remembrance is described like a body in pain. Then her hands keep busy. She picks cat hairs off his blazer with tape wrapped round her hand, smooths his collar, and stops herself rubbing noses with him the way they did when he was little. Weir chooses her words carefully here. Next to her sewing and clothes words, she slips in words from somewhere else. Which of these is a war word doing a domestic job: blockade, collar, or blazer? Blockade. A blockade cuts off an enemy's supplies, and here the poppy disrupts a blockade of bias binding, a strip of trim on a school blazer. Two more do the same job. The tape is bandaged round her hand, and later she goes out without the reinforcements of a scarf and gloves. The war has got into the clothes. Weir's own words for the poppy are "spasms of paper red, disrupting a blockade". The red breaks into the neat yellow trim the way an attack breaks a blockade, so even the symbol of remembrance arrives like an assault.

Now the time in the poem, because it will not stay still. One moment he is a young man leaving, the next she remembers him small, and then he is gone through the front door. Afterwards she goes into his bedroom, lets a songbird out of its cage, and follows a dove to the churchyard. At the top of the hill, "I traced the inscriptions on the war memorial". She touches other people's names, because she cannot touch him. Then she "leaned against it like a wishbone", her body propped on the stone. A wishbone is the thin bone two people pull to make a wish, so the image is fragile, and it is still hoping. Above her, the dove she followed is now "an ornamental stitch" in the sky. Her sewing words have followed her all the way up the hill. And the poem ends with her listening, "hoping to hear your playground voice catching on the wind". Why does she listen for a playground voice, not a soldier's?

Because in her mind he is still the child. The poem refuses the public ceremony and gives you her hands instead, and its final image is a child's voice, because the small boy is who she has been holding on to all along.

Now a different question: is the son dead? The poem never says. He may be dead, missing or simply away, and a sentence that says the poem does not confirm it is stronger than a guess either way. That uncertainty is the experience the poem is about: the people at home live in the not knowing, the same not knowing the country honoured with an unnamed grave.

Now the lines to take into the exam, in the order the poem gives them. "Three days before Armistice Sunday": beside the ceremony, not in it. "I pinned one onto your lapel": a mother's hands doing a small domestic job, and every image in the poem is her hands on him. "spasms of paper red": the poppy, the symbol of remembrance, described as a body in pain. "I traced the inscriptions on the war memorial": the public monument stands in for a body she cannot hold. And "your playground voice": she is listening for a child, not a soldier, so the poem ends with him small again. In the cluster, Poppies answers what conflict leaves behind, and it sits well beside Remains or Kamikaze, where the war also comes home.

Quick memory run now. Each line loses one word. The poppy petals are spasms of paper what? Red. Spasms of paper red, remembrance as pain. Now the doorstep: I pinned one onto your what? Lapel. Her hands on his clothes, just before he goes out of the door. Here's the ending: hoping to hear your what voice? Playground. A child's voice, not a soldier's. One more, imagined: if it ended at the Remembrance service instead, what would it lose? Its privacy and its doubt. It would join the public ceremony it spends the whole poem standing beside, and her own uncertain grief would be swallowed by the crowd. A country once buried an unknown soldier so every family could keep hoping. Weir's mother keeps hoping too, alone, listening on a hill.

Name two war words doing a household job, without looking, and there's no need to see this twice: give it the thumb. If they slip, bookmark it and run through them once before bed.

Next in the chapter: War Photographer: a hundred agonies, and five or six get printed. Hopefully that's next in your feed, but if not, search for ScholaFly E L four oh, fourteen.

Every other video is on scholafly.com too, easy to search by video code or by keyword. Whatever you're revising, go there and have a look, or, watch the next video.