POPPIES IN

JULY
Sylvia Plath
POPPIES IN JULY
 POPPIES IN JULY
 Word association:
What do you think of when you see
poppies in this image?
Can you predict what this poem ...

is about?
..... Poppies ...

...
 POPPIES IN JULY
 Read the text
 General class discussion – first impressions.

 Content of poem
 Language
 Themes
 CONTENT OF THE POEM:
 WHAT IS THIS POEM ABOUT?

 The speaker (presumably Plath) is looking at a field of

poppies in the summer.
 She is in an extremely agitated frame of mind.

 She is ‘anti-poppy’ and does not celebrate their beauty or

their natural existence.
 She uses several violent and disturbing comparisons to
describe the poppies that form an extended metaphor....
 CONTENT OF THE POEM:
 This extended metaphor forms in Verse One and
develops in Verses Three and Four:

 V1: The poppies’ intense redness reminds her of the fires

of hell – “little hell flames”
 V3: The poppies remind her of mouths that are wounded
and bleeding – They are “wrinkly and clear red, like
the skin of a mouth.// A mouth just bloodied.”
 V4: She compares the poppies to skirts that are covered
in blood: “Little bloody skirts”.
 CONTENT OF THE POEM:
 Poet is worn out and exhausted – even the experience of
staring at the poppies tires the poet.
 Gripped by feelings of numbness and emptiness.

 Longs to escape numbness and feel physical pain, such as:

-wanting the poppies to burn her (L.4)

-wants to be punched in the mouth (L.12)

 Poppies produce opiates, drugs that put their users into a

calm and blissful state of sleep.
 She imagines drinking the opiate in liquid form (L.13)
which would put her into a trance/sleep to switch off the
“Dulling and stilling”.
 CONTENT OF THE POEM:
 The poet imagines herself in a glass capsule (see “Sylvia
Plath: Her Life” worksheet!!!)

 2 readings of this glass capsule:

 A) Reference to the fairy tale ‘Snow White’ – longing for a
deep sleep?

 B) (see w/s) In a journal entry (dated in 1963) she

described her existence as being “enclosed in a wall of
glass” – utterly confined.

 “But colorless. Colorless”. ???

 FOCUSING ON THE TITLE:
 Do you think this is an appropriate title?
Were your previous predictions accurate?!

POPPIES: What could they represent?

-natural beauty, life, colour, vibrancy...
-Also, they are the symbol of Remembrance Day –
commemorating the battlefields in Western Europe on which
the British fought during WW1. When soldiers witnessed the
millions of poppies in bloom they claimed that each
represented a drop of blood shed by on of their own.
?? Could Sylvia be linking this war with her own personal life
struggles?
LANGUAGE
 Tone of language – masochistic (desire for self-harm);
also depressed tone
 Poem is written in couplets (2 lines per verse) – choppy
lines represent her mental state.
 Extended metaphor of poppies (V.1 to V.4)

 Simile: “like the skin of a mouth”

 Poet uses synaesthesia to convey her bewildered state

during this tumultuous time (marriage breakdown).
 SYNAESTHESIA: Confusion of senses – she attempts
to touch the ‘fumes’, yet the imagined flames fail to burn
her.
 Use of vowel sounds.

 - BROAD vowel sounds (a,o,u) mirror the poet’s lethargic

and numbed state.
 e.g.
“I cannot touch you” (L.3)
 “Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?”
  long, drawn out words used.

 - SLENDER vowel sounds (i.e) mirror the lively poppies.

 e.g.“Little poppies” (L.1) and “flicker” (L.3)
All words associated with poppies include slender vowels –
mimic sharp spite of poet’s voice.
 Use of repetition also depicts her mental anguish and
decline as the repetition is present in the second half of
the poem.
 “Little”

 “Capsule”

 “Colorless”
THEMES
 THEMES:
THEME 1:
Mental Anguish: Neutrality
-Speaker is exhausted and gripped by
numbness and emptiness.
-The fact that she feels nothing causes her
great mental anguish.
-Her utter neutrality makes her long for
some form of extreme physical sensation.
-She reaches out to the poppies to harm
her (remains untouched)
-So numb she feels nothing
THEME 2:
Self-destructive tendencies
-The speaker is obviously suffering from
clinical depression.
-Like many depressed people, she feels
numb and she also has a strong desire to
self-harm.
-She sees two ways out:
a) Experiencing intense physical pain
b) Slipping into a drug-induced trance
-”marry” (L.12) can be linked to her own
difficult marriage which contributed to
her self-destruction
 THEMES
THEME 3:
Nature
-The landscapes Plath uses
represent her own mental state.
-She referred to such landscapes as
‘psychic landscapes’
-The landscape of the field of
poppies corresponds to her mental
turmoil.
-”little hell flames”
-Hellish landscape –in a living hell
THEME 4:
Loneliness/Isolation
-The contrast between the field of
poppies and the single speaker
highlights how alone/isolated she is.
-She cannot touch, she cannot feel,
therefore cannot be part of the
outside world
-”glass capsule” is a symbol of her
confinement, loneliness etc.