Poppies in July - Miss O` Connell`s English Class
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Transcript Poppies in July - Miss O` Connell`s English Class
POPPIES IN JULY
Sylvia Plath
Textbook Pg. 192
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 selfharm); 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 selfdestruction
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.