IX.
THE POPPIES IN THE CORN
I AM writing here in Australia, but in fancy I am standing once more by the old signal-station at Beachy Head! Even as I scrawl the title across this sheet my mind romps across the years to the happy old times on the wind-swept Sussex downs. They were crowded hours of glorious life when we, as boys, left our lovely inland home behind us, and went off, our faces flushed with excitement, to spend a week by the waves. The delight of hearing once more the song of the surge, of scampering at low tide among the shells and the sea-weed on the strangely crinkled sands; of splashing and bathing in the restless surf; of watching the dense black crowd as it roamed about the pebbly beach; of hearing the minstrels and seeing Punch and Judy from the promenade! These raptures were transporting enough; but they were scarcely greater than the exhilarating experience of climbing over the great undulating downs, and of beholding, up on the hills there, the glorious golden cornfields all bespangled with the bravery of their flaring scarlet poppies. The man who has once seen the brilliant blossoms flash out, like flames, from among the bowing ears of corn, and then vanish again as the waves of gold surged up around them, will carry with him to his dying day the vivid memory of that lovely scene. Kingsley says that very often, in the course of a quiet stroll through the sequestered English fields all the leaves and the grasses and the birds seemed to be calling out to him, but he felt a sense of humiliation and embarrassment at being unable to discover what they were saying. As I stand to-day beside this poppy-strewn cornfield, I should dearly love to catch its message, and to pass it on. Surely, surely, surely so altogether fascinating a phenomenon must have some wonderfully beautiful interpretation. If only I could find it!
I must call to my assistance a naturalist, perhaps the most mystical and in-seeing of all naturalists. I have just been reading all the works of Richard Jefferies, The Gamekeeper, The Poacher, Field and Hedgerow, and the rest. It has been a perfect revelry. He has several things to say about the poppies. But he only once tries to interpret them. The poppies, he thinks, stand for genius. ‘There is genius in them,’ he says, ‘the genius of colour; and by their genius they are saved.’ The interpretation does not satisfy me; but it gives me a clue, and I shall follow it. The poppies in the corn represent the brilliant among the commonplace. ‘The world’s wealth,’ Carlyle tells us, ‘is in its original men. By these and their works it is a world and not a waste. Their memory and their record are its sacred property for ever.’ Mr. G. K. Chesterton, in his Victorian Age in Literature, lifts his hat respectfully to the men whom he eccentrically calls ‘The Eccentrics’ — Coleridge and Lamb, Leigh Hunt and Landor, Hazlitt and De Quincy. By ‘The Eccentrics’ Mr. Chesterton meant precisely what Carlyle meant by ‘The Originals.’ They both meant the poppies among the corn. Now, this sounds very nice. It makes us all feel that it is good to be a poppy. I can imagine dreamy young men and sentimental young ladies fancying that they already detect the spark of genius sputtering within their brains. But let us examine the poppy a little more closely. ‘Every one who has gathered the beautiful scarlet poppies,’ Richard Jefferies tells us in another volume, ‘must have noticed the perfect Maltese Cross formed inside the broad petals by the black markings.’ Now we have made a grim discovery! Here is the terrible secret of the poppy! It conceals a cross! And the cross is in its heart ! ‘Genius,’ says Goethe, ‘is that power in man which, by living and acting, makes laws and rules.’ But the man who is such a genius that he makes laws must of necessity break laws. The new rule outrages and violates the old. The fashion of to-day is the enemy of the mode of yesterday. The genius smashes his way through all the conventions. There will be frowns and scowls and pitiless criticism. There will be crucifixion. We have just celebrated the centenary of Wagner. Wagner was an original, an eccentric, a genius — a poppy among the corn. And, being a poppy, he carried a black cross in his heart, and for years suffered the mortification of seeing his best work driven from the stage by the cat-calls and dog-whistles of his relentless critics. The genius will come into his own at the last, but in the meantime he must feel the sword piercing his soul.
Mr. F. W. H. Myers, in his critique upon Wordsworth, points out that Wordsworth represents ‘what must always occur where an author, running counter to the fashion of his age, has to create his own public in defiance of the established critical powers. The disciples whom he draws round him are for the most part young; the established authorities are for the most part old; so that by the time the original poet is about sixty years old, most of his admirers are about forty and most of his critics will be dead. His admirers now become his accredited critics; his works are widely introduced to the public, and, if they are really good, his reputation is secure.’ The sun never shines upon a finer spectacle than when it illumines the fair young face of one who longs to teach the old world some new lesson, to lift poor drab humanity one inch nearer to the stars. It is very beautiful for man or maid to aspire to being a poppy among the corn. But beware! Let no such aspirant forget the black cross in the poppy’s heart. When I think of that, the poppies in the corn seem like splashes of sacrificial blood upon the golden cornfield!
There is a very loveable thing about the poppies in the corn that I can never sufficiently admire. The poppies never belittle the corn. They glorify it. You think not the less but the more of the corn because of the presence of the poppies. At a rose show one particularly radiant blossom puts to shame all the surrounding roses. They are beggared by comparison. That is because a show is all artificiality and affectation. Nature never humiliates her more modest children in that ridiculous way. As you watch the blood-red poppies tossing in a sea of golden corn, it never occurs to you to institute a comparison. The poppies and the corn seem equally lovely. That is the glory of true greatness. Others are never humiliated in its presence. It elevates the mass. If the field were all poppies, its glory would have departed. The poppies need the corn. God makes nothing commonplace. Here is a gospel for those to whom the days seem grey because they have given up dreaming of being poppies:
A commonplace life, we say and we sigh,
But why should we sigh as we say ?
The commonplace sun in the commonplace sky
Makes up the commonplace day.
The moon and the stars are commonplace things,
And the flower that blooms and the bird that sings;
But dark were the world and sad our lot,
If the flowers failed and the sun shone not.
And God who studies each separate soul
Out of commonplace lives makes His beautiful whole.
God made the poppies, and He made the corn. He made the darkness, and He made the dawn. His morning and His evening made up one perfect day. His poppies and His corn are perfect parts of His perfect whole.
And if I rightly catch the meaning of their message, as the breeze whispers among the tall corn-stalks and flutters with the poppy’s scarlet banners, they tell me that in this wondrous world work and rest are beautifully adjusted. I shall not labour the point. Anybody can see that corn means toil. Look at this t It is a cornfield. I am quoting from still another of Richard Jefferies’ books. ‘Never was such work!’ he says. ‘The wages were low in those days. The reaping was piece-work. So the reapers worked and slaved and tore at the wheat as if they were seized with a frenzy, the heat, the aches, the illness, the sunstroke, always impending in the air. It was nothing. No laugh, no song, no stay — on from morning till night, possessed with a maddening desire to labour. Their necks grew black, like black oak in old houses. Their open chests were always bare, and flat, and stark. The breastbone was burned, and their arms, tough as ash, seemed cased in leather. They grew visibly thinner in the harvest fields, and shrunk together — all flesh disappearing, and nothing but sinew and muscle remaining. Never was such work!’ I said that anybody can see that corn means toil. And anybody can see that the poppy means rest. The poppy is the queen of opiates. Laudanum and opium are her daughters. Myrtle Reed is the prophetess of the poppy. Indeed, the smell of the poppy in her stories is so strong as to be sometimes sickly. But let me lay this pretty little sketch by Mr. Edgar Wade Abbott beside Richard Jefferies’ picture of the sweat and strain of the cornfield :
The first train leaves at six p.m.
For the land where the poppy blows;
The mother dear is the engineer,
And the passenger laughs and crows.
The palace car is the mother’s arms;
The whistle, a low, sweet strain;
The passenger winks, and nods, and blinks.
And goes to sleep in the train 1
At eight p.m. the next train starts
For the Poppy Land afar.
The summons clear falls on the ear;
‘All aboard for the sleeping-car!’
‘But what is the fare to Poppy Land?
I hope it is not too dear.’
The fare is this, a hug and a kiss.
And it’s paid to the engineer!
So I ask of Him who children took
On His knee in kindness great;
‘Take charge, I pray, of the trains each day;
That leave at six and eight.
‘Keep watch on the passengers,’ thus I pray,
‘For to me they are very dear;
And special ward, O gracious Lord,
O’er the gentle engineer!’
God never meant this field to be all corn, as it was in Richard Jefferies’ picture of the toilers among the wheat; nor all poppies, as in some of Myrtle Reed’s deathly scenes. He sprinkles the poppies among the corn. Labour and rest, as meted out by His hand, are very beautifully and very delicately adjusted.
But the poppies in the corn have kept their best secret till the last. They tell me that they are simply a reflection of my own life and its deepest experiences. And, now that I come to review that life of mine, it does look very much like a field of corn, with poppies here and there. Most of our days are like the plain corn-stalks, but life is sprinkled with days that are conspicuous, scarlet, unforgettable. ‘There are days in spring’ says Richard Jefferies again, ‘when the white clouds go swiftly past, with occasional breaks of bright sunshine lighting up a spot in the landscape. That is like the memory of one’s youth. There is a long, dull blank, and then a brilliant streak of recollection.’ Jefferies goes on to speak of the day when he fired his first gun and the day when he shot his first snipe. Michael Fairless, too, chats through a couple of pages about the great moments of her memory. There was the night when she was called up to see the moon’s eclipse ; there was the night when she saw the huge seas breaking over the great lighthouse at Whitby; there was the day when she found the first cowslips of spring, and sang to herself for pure joy of their colour and fragrance ; and there was the day when she first beheld the Rhine. We all find such poppies in our corn. There was Charles Lamb’s great day when he visited the home of the Wordsworths, waded up the bed of Lodore, and clambered up to the top of Skiddaw. ‘It was fairyland!’ he says. ‘That day will stand out like a mountain in my life!’ What a day was that when George Borrow opened a copy of Robinson Crusoe I or when Samuel Johnson found Law’s Serious Call! or when Robert Chambers discovered the Encyclopaedia Britannica! ‘My life,’ says Chambers, ‘was dark and cheerless till one day I found a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in a cupboard in an attic. I learned from it that there were such things as literature, and astronomy, and geology. It was like cutting a window in a jail-cell through which I saw the world and the heavens beyond!’ Here are poppies among the corn! Yes, and there are days that, like the poppy, look like splashes of blood on the cornfield—days with a black cross in the very heart of them. I snip an inch or so from the police-court column of a news-paper by way of illustration. ‘A poor, faded little woman was brought into court as witness in a disagreeable case, involving very serious issues. The entire case depended on the fact that a paper had been signed on a certain day, and this the forlorn little woman was prepared to prove. “You saw the paper signed?” asked the opposing counsel in cross-examination. “Yes, sir.” “You take your oath that it was the thirtieth of August?” “I know it was, sir.” The lawyer, who thought another date could be proved, assumed an exasperating smile, and repeated her words. “You know it was! And now, be so good as to tell us just how you know it.” The poor little creature looked from one countenance to another with wide, sorrowful eyes, as if she sought understanding and sympathy. Then her gaze rested on the face of the kindly judge. “I know,” she said, as if speaking to him alone, “because that was the day my baby died!”’ Here was a blood-red poppy to suddenly flash out in a very ordinary cornfield! Or look at this :
The world remembers on that day,
A nation’s splendid victory;
The day I first beheld your face
Is all it means to me!
Another day! How could I reck
War, famine, earthquake, aught beside?
My heart knows only one event—
It was the day you died!
Here are notable poppies sprinkling life’s golden cornfield!
I was passing, the other evening, a certain mission-hall in Melbourne. I peeped in. A great crowd of rough-looking men and women were singing, many of them with manifest emotion :
O happy day that fixed my choice,
On Thee, my Saviour and my God!
Well may this glowing heart rejoice,
And tell its raptures all abroad.
Happy day! happy day!
When Jesus washed my sins away.
If only I could have got to the backs of the minds of all these singers and investigated the ‘happy days’ that were surging through their memories as they sang, what poppies I should have seen bespangling these commonplace cornfields. Conversion was a soul-stirring and sensational experience to these people. That day stands out like a poppy with scarlet petals (and always the Cross as its centre-piece) in the thoughts of these happy singers. Yes, it is impossible to think of the red, red poppy without thinking of the black, black Cross. That is why the day of the Cross is the ruddiest and most radiant poppy in the whole field of human history. It is the blood-mark which shall glorify and sanctify every ear of common corn as long as the world shall stand.
-F.W. Boreham
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