I was listening to the radio, and someone said poppies were used as a symbol for loss and death before World War One. With a link to Waterloo, and the symbolism of the sleep that opiates can induce.
Does anyone know how long the poppy has been linked t death and warfare. Ths is significant as it is a central symbol in Britain's 100 ear anniversary of the start of WWI
In the language of flowers, a Victorian era affectation of assigning meanings or associations to a very wide range of flowers for passing fashionable messages, the poppy was assigned the meaning of sleep, or oblivion, or eternal sleep i.e. it could mean peaceful death. Probably because of the long known use of poppy seed as a sleep inducing drug.
The use of the poppy as a symbol of violent death in war appears to arise wholly from the imagery in the popular war time poem "In Flanders Fields" written after the second battle of Ypres (WWI)