Analysis Of The Poem Poppies

Memories are presented as inevitable, devious and persistent in both Poppies and Remains. Through metaphorical language, techniques and structure, the poems demonstrate how memories are traps which are arduous to escape, so much so that the victims of these recollections often give oneself over and allow them to take over their minds.

Weir’s poem ‘Poppies’ illustrates a modern war poem about a mother recalling her last memories of her son before he left for war as a response to Duffy’s request for a modern war poem. At the beginning of the dramatic monologue, the mother talks about poppies and says: ‘before you left, I pinned one onto your lapel’ which is a subtle reference to when he was a schoolboy. A ‘lapel’ is the collar of a jacket or

To contrast Poppies, Armitage’s poem depicts how the soldier’s memories of this event were completely unwanted and certainly not a coping mechanism, as demonstrated when Tromans claims that ‘the drink and the drugs won’t flush him out’. Through the plosive sounds of the ‘d’ in ‘drink’ and ‘drugs’, an aggressive tone is established to both mirror the reality of war and imply that the memories are also aggressive. As somebody may flinch at the harsh sound of the plosives, the soldier flinches at the thought of what he did: how he took another human being’s life. Even though Tromans may not have seen this soldier as a person when he shot him, it is clear that he began to towards the end of the poem, reflected by the word ‘him’ which suggests that he now sees this dead soldier as a person with feelings, making it increasingly harder to escape the cruel traps of memories. This habit of perceiving the deceased as real people to remove a sense of guilt is common between both poems and exemplifies how the mind is devious and cunning and even though they think they’re the one in control of it, it’s actually controlling and manipulating

The phrase ‘bloody hands’ contains intertextual links with ‘Macbeth’ by Shakespeare, specifically when Lady Macbeth hallucinates blood on her hands after murdering King Duncan which enhances how memories are conniving, especially those related to death. Another possible interpretation is that the blood is a metaphor for the mental damage of war and how there are reminders of this traumatising event everywhere, which can be supported by the word ‘in’, suggesting that the dead soldier is now a part of him. This contrasts Poppies because in this poem, the soldier is desperate to segregate himself from this horrific event, whereas the mother in Poppies is desperate to fuse herself to the memory of her son. However, this is also what makes them similar: the way they deal with these memories. Both the mother and the soldier dig further down, whether it’s by refusing to live in the present (Poppies) or continuously trying to rid oneself of the past (Remains), neither bode well for the