“Poppies in July” begins with a strange apostrophe: the speaker has a chat with a field of summer poppies. Her tone is unsettling. While she affectionately calls the flowers “little poppies,” a moment later she calls them “little hell flames,” and asks them, with seeming mingled dread and eagerness, “Do you do no harm?” That uncanny mixture of sweetness and horror will inform this whole poem.
As it turns out, the speaker might prefer it if these dainty little flowers could do some harm. As they “flicker” like hellfire, she doesn’t draw back, but “put[s her] hands among the flames,” only to discover that “nothing burns.” She sees terrible things in these poppies, then; she sees the fires of hell itself. But the horror is all inside her.
It takes a certain state of mind to see hell in a field of poppies. This speaker is clearly in a frightening place, going through agonizing mental and emotional pain. The loaded metaphor of “hell flames” underscores that idea: these aren’t just any old fires, but fires of torment, judgment, and damnation. The speaker’s vague hope that the poppies might actually burn her hints that physical pain seems preferable to the kind of mental anguish that transforms a field of summer flowers into hell itself.
Compounding her pain is the fact that she can’t even seem to “touch” the poppies, let alone be burned by them. Part of her suffering, then, comes from a sense of being cut off from ordinary sensation. Her pain isolates her.
Paradoxically, though, these images of inaccessibility also conjure up a vivid, tangible real-life scene. A blood-red, blazing field of poppies, their petals so delicate that they “flicker.” There’s beauty here, for sure—but the speaker is in no state of mind to perceive it or be comforted by it.
In this poem, Plath will explore anguish across 15 lines of free verse. Most of the poem is divided into neat two-line stanzas, each framing one or two blood-red, nightmarish images.