Sometimes emotion must be suppressed in order to be expressed. Take that lone piper up there, playing "The Flowers of the Forest," voicing our grief for us. If the piper were to break down in tears, we would feel only embarrassment. Maybe Schadenfreude if you hate bagpipes.
Wordsworth gives us the recipe for poetry, which "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced." Tranquillity's the leaven; you can't taste it in the final product, but it's what raises the whole thing above the status of a sodden mess.
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In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row. . . .
The poppies are metonymic. It's a nice spot of colour on a grey November day, isn't it? Thank God, in this multicultural society, that they do not try to have us wear crosses on our lapels. I wouldn't do it. Of course the crosses are metonymic, too. Thank God they do not have us wear soldiers' bones.
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Poppies grow very well in Afghanistan. They're the most important cash crop there, a mainstay of the economy. They are not grown for metonymy there; there's more money in psychotropics than in tropes. I do not think poppies grow very well in the Syrian Desert, but perhaps they flourish in the gardens of Mesopotamia. The poets had better get cracking; we are going to need all the tranquillity we can get our hands on.