How do I analyse Poppies for GCSE?

What is Poppies about?

Poppies is spoken by a mother to her son. It opens three days before Armistice Sunday, the day in November when Britain remembers those killed in war. Before he leaves home, she pins a paper poppy to his blazer and fusses over his clothes, picking off cat hairs and smoothing his collar. She longs to rub noses with him as she did when he was little, and to run her fingers through his hair, but she holds back. She cannot find the words she needs.

He leaves, excited, into a world that seems full of promise. After he has gone, she goes into his bedroom and sets a songbird free from its cage. Then she follows a dove up the hill to the war memorial, where she traces the inscriptions and listens for his voice as it sounded when he was a child.

Weir never says exactly where the son has gone, or whether he comes back. The war graves at the start and the memorial at the end suggest he has gone to war, and perhaps died. That uncertainty is part of the poem's power, because it leaves the reader in the mother's position, waiting without knowing.

What is the context of Poppies?

Jane Weir is a British poet who has also worked as a textile designer. That background shows in the poem, which is threaded with words from sewing and fabric. She wrote Poppies in 2009, when British troops were fighting in Afghanistan and news of soldiers' deaths was reaching families at home.

Armistice Sunday, now usually called Remembrance Sunday, is the Sunday nearest to 11 November, the date in 1918 when the fighting in the First World War stopped. Red poppies became a symbol of remembrance after that war, because they grew on the battlefields of the Western Front. Many people in Britain wear paper poppies in the weeks before Remembrance Sunday.

For AO3, the key idea is whose voice we hear. Many of the war poems in the anthology are about soldiers. Poppies is set entirely at home and gives the voice to a mother, whose grief is quieter than a battle but no less real.

How does Weir present a mother's loss in Poppies?

Weir sets the poem in an ordinary home, then fills it with the language of war. The poppy on the blazer is "spasms of paper red": "spasms" suggests sudden pain, and the red hints at blood. The Sellotape the mother uses to pick off cat hairs is "bandaged" around her hand, the edging on the blazer is a "blockade", and later she goes out without the "reinforcements" of a scarf and gloves. The family home has become a kind of front line.

The mother also holds her feelings back. The line "steeled the softening / of my face" shows her hardening herself like metal so that her son will not see her upset. Weir's sewing words show the struggle inside her. Her words are "flattened, rolled, turned into felt", pressed down until they lose their shape, and her stomach is busy making the tucks and pleats of dressmaking. Felt is a fabric, but it is also the past tense of "feel".

After he leaves, she "released a song bird from its cage", a symbol of letting her son go, and perhaps of his spirit leaving home. A dove, a traditional symbol of peace, leads her to the war memorial, where she "leaned against it like a wishbone". The simile makes her body look thin and breakable, and a wishbone is also for making wishes, perhaps for his safe return. She ends the poem listening for "your playground voice catching on the wind", still hearing the child he used to be.

What do the form and structure of Poppies add?

Poppies is written in free verse, with no regular rhyme scheme or metre, in four stanzas of different lengths. It reads like the mother's thoughts spilling out as they come, which suits a speaker whose feelings keep breaking through. It is addressed to "you", her son, as if she is talking to him even though he has gone.

Weir uses enjambment, where a sentence runs on past the end of a line, and caesura, a pause in the middle of a line, all the way through. Sentences spill across line breaks and then stop suddenly mid-line, like someone trying to speak while holding back tears. The line break after "softening" is a good example: her face softens for a moment before the next line finishes the thought.

The structure follows time. The poem moves from the goodbye to the mother's lonely walk after he has gone, and it ends at the war memorial with her still waiting. It opens with poppies on war graves and closes at a memorial to the dead, so remembrance frames it from start to finish.

Which poems does Poppies compare well with?

Poppies pairs well with poems about the people war leaves behind, and with poems about memory and loss. Three strong choices are below. Pick one you can quote confidently from memory.

What could an exam question on Poppies ask?

In AQA Paper 2, Section B prints one named poem from the Power and Conflict cluster, and you compare it with one other poem from the cluster, chosen from memory. The question is worth 30 marks, assessed on AO1, AO2 and AO3. There are no marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar in this section.

Poppies could be the printed poem, or the second poem you bring in yourself. Two focuses to practise:

Focus 1: Compare how poets present the effects of war on people at home in Poppies and in one other poem from Power and Conflict.

Focus 2: Compare how poets present family relationships in Poppies and in one other poem from Power and Conflict.

Here is an original model opening for the first focus, comparing Poppies with War Photographer:

Both poets explore how war is felt by people far from the fighting. Weir's mother feels it intensely, yet hides it from her son, and the phrase "steeled the softening / of my face" shows how much effort that takes. Her grief is private and physical. Duffy's newspaper readers, by contrast, are moved only briefly, shedding tears "between the bath and pre-lunch beers". Written in 2009, during the war in Afghanistan, Poppies gives a voice to the families at home whom Duffy's readers never picture.

Key quotations from Poppies to learn

Six short quotations, each with a line of analysis to learn alongside it.

• "spasms of paper red": the poppy. "Spasms" suggests sudden pain and the red hints at blood, so even a symbol of remembrance carries a wound.
• "steeled the softening / of my face": the mother hardens herself like steel to hide her feelings, and the line break leaves "softening" hanging for a moment.
• "flattened, rolled, turned into felt": her words are pressed flat like fabric. "Felt" is also the past tense of "feel", so the word holds what she cannot say.
• "released a song bird from its cage": a symbol of letting her son go, and perhaps of his spirit leaving home.
• "leaned against it like a wishbone": at the memorial her body forms a fragile shape. A wishbone is for making wishes, and it snaps easily.
• "your playground voice catching on the wind": the poem ends on longing. She listens for the child he once was, and we never learn whether he comes home.