Poppies is a poem written by Jane Weir. Armistice Sunday is a tradition which marked the end of World War one in 1918. It was set up to remember the thousands of men that died in the fighting, even though their names will still be lost. So the period which the poem was written was the early 1900’s during the time of the First World War. Jane Wier was born in 1963, and grew up in Italy and Northern England. She owned a textile business which influenced some of her language in the poem. Even though the story is based on the First World War, it was influenced by her experience of soldiers dying in Iraq and Afghanistan in more recent times.
The poem is about a mother expressing the feelings of her son in different moments in time, such as when the child is young, when the son leaves to go to war and finally the death of her son. The emotions that are given of by the poem are sadness and melancholy. The poem is written about topics that trigger these emotions such as the mother talking to her son in a way that shifts through time from when the child was young to where the man dies. The mother expresses her grief through out the poem which is another emotion the poem is based on, which creates a sorrow atmosphere as she grieves the death of her child.
The structure of the poem is organised as it is set out into four stanzas. But the way it is read out sounds like thoughts as there are a lot of commas, which created pauses in the poem. This suggests that the narrator is trying to remain calm and peaceful but there are bursts of sadness that leak out which are the breaks caused by the punctuation such as the full stops and commas. It appears as it is more the mothers thoughts than ordinary speech. Unlike most poems it does not include rhyme and when read out it doesn’t appear to have a rhythm. She uses words like “blockade,spasm and bandage” The words are connotations of war and violence. It the imagery portrays to the audience the mothers thoughts, and it appears to be fragments of her memory of her sons violent death. Jane Weir uses a lot of language that refers to materials and textile such as “felt, stitch, pleats and gloves”. This creates a semantic field of clothing which she weaves in and out of her poem. By doing this she adds texture to her poem and different levels of meaning such as
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