Having seen and understood both sides of the “should the poppy installation be extended” dilemma (Letters, 3 November), I think I have a serious, workable and poignant solution. The installation should come down on schedule, as per the original artistic vision. However, beforehand, it should be photographed from all viewing points in the highest resolution. Using state-of-the-art projection technology, this “ghost” of the original installation could be made to reappear as the evening falls and remain bright all night, only to fade again as the sun comes up. For does not the poem say: “At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them.”
I think this solution would satisfy all, and there’s no doubt that the expertise and technology to achieve it on short notice exists right here in London.
Simon Lovelace
London
“The poppies’ transience was part of the original artistic concept” (Tower of London officials stand firm on poppies deadline, 7 November). So next year why not plant living red poppies in the moat? They will look the same from space – and they really do die.
Bob Mays
Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire
While I sympathise with Jonathan Jones’ belief that art tackling war should depict its horrors, he misses a key point about the poppies’ location. The Tower of London is a symbol of the establishment’s centuries of exercising power through the deployment of bloodshed and torture, captured in this work by the poppy-blood pouring from its windows.
The moat – a trench transformed by the poppies into a bloody lake – is a potent re-imagining of the trenches of the first world war, a reminder of the mass reduction of young men to gore. As art it works precisely because it brings the horror of war into the capital, its ultimate source, and challenges those who would turn it into sentiment to look, and imagine, again.
Ian Crockatt
Banff, Aberdeenshire
