The Poppy in the Cloud and in our garden

Poppy has been used as a symbol of sleep, peace and death mainly because of opium extracted from it. Papaver somniferum is opium poppy (somni- means sleep).  Papaverine was discovered by George Merck in 1848.  He emigrated from Germany to U.S.A. in 1691, setting up the branch office of his family Co. that traced back to 17^th century.  It turned into the pharmaceutical giant as we know it.

Every so often I would see good quotes in Joy’s lecture Power Point slides; this one is from the lecture of “Pharmacology of drug abuse”—the opening lines of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night,

If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

Emily Dickinson analyzed the flowers of her garden in her poems; to her flowers are symbols of things in life; not only do they represent aesthetic beauty or love, they may also represent death.  It is entirely appropriate to talk about the destruction of the world on Doom’s Day, likening a brilliant sunset to “The Poppy in the Cloud”.

You’ll see the bright red Poppy in our garden is like a brilliant red sun.

It was a quiet seeming Day —

There was no harm in earth or sky —

Till with the closing sun

There strayed an accidental Red

A Strolling Hue, one would have said

To westward of the Town —

But when the Earth began to jar

And Houses vanished with a roar

And Human Nature hid

We comprehended by the Awe

As those that Dissolution saw

The Poppy in the Cloud