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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 in July. Read the text General class discussion – first impressions.
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Poppies in July Sylvia Plath Textbook Pg. 192
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 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?
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”
