"Big Poppy," featured in Ted Hughes' Flowers and Insects: Some Birds and a Pair of Spiders (1986), is a poem about sex and death. A first-person speaker dramatically narrates the path of a bumble bee as it guzzles nectar from a poppy flower. He elaborates extensively upon the poppy's appearance, articulating the poppy's powerful impression upon both the bee and himself. The bee and the poppy are personified as a man and woman engaged in a sexual activity. Hughes' colorful, active language imbues their interaction with a degree of urgency and fatalism: August is approaching, which means the poppy flower will soon fade.
Like the majority of Hughes' poems, "Big Poppy" uses elements and characters from the natural world to illuminate human experience. The wild, unrestrained sexuality attached to the poppy flower, and the helpless, difficult pleasure the bee experiences, corresponds to a fleeting, albeit intense, fling between two partners. The absence of tender language in the speaker's description of the poppy emphasizes the poem's sexual charge. Additionally, the action of a bee pollinating a flower is a brilliant vehicle for a purely erotic relationship because of its transience: a bee pollinates one flower then quickly moves on to the next, while the flower waits for another bee to land within her petals.
Flowers and Insects features illustrations by Leonard Baskin, an artist Ted Hughes met in 1958 while living in Massachusetts with Sylvia Plath. The poet and artist collaborated on several projects, such as Hughes' collection Crow (1970). "Big Poppy," which appears towards the end of the collection, is accompanied by a large, red poppy flower against a mustard-colored and imperial purple painted canvas. Baskin exquisitely renders the details Hughes' uses in his personified description of the flower, including the poppy's "stripped athletic leg" in the multitude of thin, hair-like tendrils covering the flower's stem.
