Orienting towards a poem: Poppies in July by Sylvia Plath

I remember an article I wrote for a university magazine back in 2006.  It was about how most readers find amateur poetry abstruse and even tedious, because of the very fact that it's abstruse. [I'll put a link to that article in a few days, after tweaking the editing a bit. :)] I was trying to explain why we published such poetry in the magazine and of course to encourage the young readers to give the young poets a chance by at least reading them out. This is what I wrote:

"In fact, poetry is an obscure medium. Most very popular poem are the most difficult to understand. I do not think anybody can appreciate Eliot's Wasteland without having a knowledge of the epoch. Most of Frost's poems are highly symbolic. We understand them, because we try. And trying is what we do not do when dealing with unfamiliar poets."

What I could not pin it down to, back then, was the problem of orientation.
I realised that yesterday after reading an article on Getting Acquainted with a Poem, by Paula Johnson (1975, College English, Vol. 37(4): 358-367). Through an interesting experiment (asking students to identify the message in unfamiliar poems), she demonstrated just how important orientation is.

The way I understand it, orientation is formatting the mind to comprehend novel expressions. It involves identifying placement, structure/technique, and message. Sounds vague, so let me explain.

When you place a poem, you try to literally locate it in space and time: the era, the time in poet's life, location. That helps. There are some poems which you simply cannot understand, or really appreciate otherwise. For example, Wordsworth The French Revolution as it Appeared to it's Enthusiasts at it's Commencement. If you don't know what the French Revolution was all about, you simply will not get this poem at all. For a better understanding, one might like to know what Mr. Wordsworth was doing at the time of the Revolution, i.e. what was going on in the poet's life and mind. (Any letters written during that time can be invaluable.) Some people might be aware of his active interest and later disillusionment with the Revolution. This is placement. It tells you what was going on in the world around the poet and sometimes the intensity and extent of the poet's involvement with the state of affairs. One generally does have to do some background research on this aspect.

But luckily, not all poems really require this much research. Most poems are not time bound. Anyone can relate to them just by sensitising oneself to the the language of poetry.

That is, the structure. Structure often involves the conscious use of techniques: alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, conceit, refrain, imagery, prosody, etc. [Don't know what these words mean? Learn them. It will do you a world of good if you are for real a poetry lover. Check out some of these definitions at: http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072405228/student_view0/poetic_glossary.html.] Identify the structure. Then think over it.

Structure also involves the structure of thoughts. For example, take Sylvia Plath's Poppies in July. In the beginning, she can touch the poppies, but is unable to feel their heat. Later, she sees fumes emanating from them that she cannot touch. She finally recedes into a glass capsule where even the opiates cannot seep in. There is a constantly increasing physical recession.

Imagery also has to be decoded. The red flames which do not burn in the beginning, themselves appear to be the victims by the middle of the poem: bloodied mouths and bloody skirts. An ulcer? An internal laceration induced by a sharp poison?

There is in fact poison right inside the belly of the bloodied mouths and skirts. It's the opium. There is a reiteration of the envy, this time: If I could bleed or sleep!.../ If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

But by then, she has withdrawn further. She is in a glass capsule where she does not even have the strength or freedom to burn or poison herself. She is so enfeebled that even the red colour stings her, a feeling reiterated in the Tulips: The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. She wants a colourless, painless, passionless death for herself.

Did you just realise we got to the message just by analysing the structure?

Let me place the poem now to complete this study. This poem is a part of her poetry collection Ariel, which was posthumously published in 1965. Sylvia Plath killed herself by placing her head in a burning oven in 1963.