In Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” poppies symbolize blood and wartime sacrifice: “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning… / If you could hear… / My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori”—a reference later crystallized by the red poppy of remembrance; John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” cemented the poppy as a memorial emblem: “Poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row”; In Romantic poetry, poppies signify sleep and oblivion: Keats writes of “the poppy’s drowsy juice” in “Ode to a Nightingale”; Victorian floriography assigned poppies meanings of “consolation” or “eternal sleep”; Modern poets contrast the poppy’s delicate beauty with its narcotic danger: “She wore poppies—not for war, but for the dreams they steal”; In agricultural verse, wild poppies color fallow fields: “Poppies blush where wheat once stood.”