Sylvia Plath's winter poppies are females. She wrote two poems about poppies: Poppies in July and Poppies in October. July poppies may be gender-neutral, but the winter ones are certainly women.
There are three gender references in the poem Poppies in October. Firstly, her poppy petals are like skirts. She first compares the skirts to sun-clouds, flitting and fluttering in the wind like a skirt, and then she compares them to an actual woman's skirt. Poppy is also a much less known Greek goddess.
The woman in the ambulance, maybe Plath herself, or any woman, is of course in pain. But for Sylvia, the woman's ability to feel pain raises her to a higher level among all things alive: The tortured heart is not bleeding, it's blooming, and that too, astoundingly. The blooming passion is her love gift to a man, who didn't ask for it, or doesn't care. Just like the poppies' flames are passions utterly unasked for by a sky.
And like the sky, which ignites the carbon monoxides but doesn't care for the fires that erupt thereafter, the eyes... under bowlers, are the eyes of uncaring men. The eyes have been dulled by the protection of their hats. They don't see the passions burning before them. This is the second gender reference.
The last stanza further strengthens the gender-roles. The men are cold, like frost, dispassionate, like the blue cornflowers. [Cornflowers are also called bachelor's buttons, again, male.] And the the love-hungry poppies/women are crying with open mouths for a drop of affection in this cold world of cold men.
And it's humiliating, it's killing. It makes her gasp: Oh my God! Why am I here? Why are the poppies not dead in bitter cold October?
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