Poppies Flashcards
“Spasms of paper red, disrupting a blockade of yellow bias binding around your blazer”
-‘red paper’ is the poppy but the arrangement of the paper is in ‘spasms’ which obviously is in the semantic field of pain and conveys the mothers physical pain but also hints the possibility of the sons pain in the death and the ‘red’ symbolises the blood. So pinning the poppy to his blazer, she is imagining his eventual death. If it’s about a war poem or the spasms indicate her own emotions at saying goodbye to her son that is leaving home.
-“blockade”- the author is a clothes maker and she is using the vocabulary of stitching of embroidery of making patterns on the clothes but the blockade is also a manoeuvre in war where you block supplies coming to the enemy so her language is suggestive to war.
-‘blazer’ is not a soldiers uniform and it is a school uniform or the formal blazer that you wear in a formal kind of dress suggesting that her son is going to school or university. She wants us to imagine both perspectives at the same time - one of the perspective is the mothers grief of losing her son from her home and living his life independently and the other perspective of the mother grief of her son at war.
“Blackthorns of your hair. All my words flattened, rolled, turned into felt,”
-‘blackthorns’ - metaphor- partly it is an image of nature and it is suggesting his purity and it is also really thorny and he’s deliberately picked this hairstyle to discourage her from touching it and it is metaphorical and suggests it’s a way that the son is prickly towards her and wants to break away from the bonds of motherhood. And perhaps he feels that she is an oppressive mother.
- she is reacting the emotion-‘all my words flattened, rolled, turned into felt,” ‘felt’ is the imagery of clothing of the material and describes as felt as being in different layers. Her words are also conveying on how she feels but she is not coming out and telling her son her actual feelings because ‘felt’ is soft and her words are ‘flattened’ and they are not sharp and she’s not revealing her true emotions. This may be annoying for her son as her son is the opposite as he expresses his emotions with the use of the metaphor-‘blackthorns’
“Slowly melting”
Metaphor- Signifies how instead of building something solid with the mothers words that her son can understand, instead the felt is slowly melting. It can reflect how her feelings are slowly melting perhaps suggesting her tears, but it also means her words don’t have proper meaning and they are just ‘melting’ into just meaninglessness.
Or it can signify how her son simply doesn’t understand her
“Threw it open, the world overflowing like a treasure chest”
-simile- shows how she decides to protect her son from her own emotions so she ‘throws open’ the front door. So she realises that letting him go offers him a great treasure of the life outside.
This simile breaks the idea of this being a war poem as it doesn’t make sense of the son going out to war even if the son is excited about joining up with the army is excited about the world being a treasure chest. It makes sense if it’s about someone who is going out in order to find new opportunities and experiences. It is also suggesting that she realises that she is letting her son free in order to have greater experiences of life even though his parting causes her to ‘melt’ causes her pain
“After you’d gone I went into your bedroom, released a song bird from its cage”
-metaphor- in one sense, the son is the songbird who has been trapped in the ‘cage’ of the family home or trapped by thus protective love for his mother but now he is gone and he’s going to be able to find his own song which shows generosity.
- but also suggests that once the son has left home, it has given the poet a new identity she is now the ‘songbird’ able to live freely and write her own birdsong in the form of the poem. She can also be portrayed being grateful for this experience because her emotions has given her the subject and tone of her birdsong.
“After you’d gone….into your bedroom”
-direct address, she is writing directly to her son which implies that she is getting him to look back on her emotions and his emotions on the day that he left. It is an expression of her love
“The dove pulled freely against the sky,”
Now she has gone through the graveyard and she’s leaning against the war memorial she sees a ‘dove’ in the sky. A dove is a symbol of peace, if it’s a war poem we can see the dove as symbolic of her sons soul now being free.
-‘sky’ It also reminds us about the songbird which was her son and the poet was finding her voice so in that sense the image is very positive and they are both free, she’s free to write her poetry and he’s free enjoying the treasure chest of opportunities that life has offered which is implied by the freedoms of the ‘sky’.
“An ornamental stitch, I listening, hoping to hear your playground voice catching on the wind”
“An ornamental stitch”- She also imagines the dove being a needle pulling a thread because it creates the ornamental stitch and this stitch is what links her son to herself and the poem is the ornament that pulls them together and the son is the dove whose freedom has created this poem.
“Playground voice”- suggests the young child that she wants to return, this doesn’t work so well as a war poem as if it was a war poem, it would be the young adult that she wants returned but if it was just about a son leaving home, then it’s the memories of what that son was like when he was young that she is trying to recapture.
