Big Poppy Analysis

Welcome to the land of symbols, imagery, and wordplay. Before you travel any further, please know that there may be some thorny academic terminology ahead. Never fear, Shmoop is here. Check out our...

Free Verse PastoralThe poem, on the page, doesn't seem to really follow any pre-set pattern of any kind. The stanzas range from one to three lines a piece, and the line lengths run the gamut from f...

Our speaker is really enthusiastic about flowers. Or at least this particular flower. You might be able to picture him, sitting at the edge of the garden mentioned in the poem, just enraptured by t...

The setting for most of this poem is fairly static – since the entire piece is a meditation on a plant, and plants don't typically get up and walk away from you, we're in once physical place...

Despite all the adjective-piling that we talk about in the "Calling Card" section of this analysis, this poem is actually full of pauses and shorter sentences. A lot of the lines are end-stopped, w...

The title is relatively self-explanatory, here – the poem is singularly focused on a poppy, and so "Big Poppy" seems like an apt title. But why not just "Poppy" or maybe "The Poppy"? In keepi...

The King of AdjectivesSo usually, adjectives are kind of a last go-to for poets. Adjectives and adverbs are almost always pegged as weaker parts of speech than nouns and verbs, because they don't a...

(4) Base CampAlthough you might need to do a bit of a Google Image search for pictures of poppies in order to get the whole thing into your head visually, this poem doesn't really do anything too c...

Ted Hughes was one of the first true activists in the mid-twentieth century environmental movement, calling on all of England's major politicians to take action against pollution. (source)Hughes st...

Probably R, though maybe only PG-13This poem is all about sex. But wait, you say! There are no people in this poem! How could it possibly be all about sex? Well, let's just put it this way –...