"Already her dark pod is cooking its drug./ Every breath imperils her. Her crucible/ Is falling apart with its own fierceness."
As the poppy "helplessly" embraces the bee, the speaker turns his attention away from the present action and focuses instead on the poppy's imminent demise. These lines imbue the poem with an additional element of fatalism and risk: the poppy is dying in the midst of her affair with the bee, because the bee has pollinated her center, which means her seed pod will grow and cause her petals to fall.
"A fly, cool, rests on the flame-fringe."
While the bee and the poppy are in the middle of their affair, the speaker mentions a fly who sits on the edge of the poppy's petal. The fly, unlike the "hot-eyed" poppy, is "cool," which explains the sudden shift in the poem's tone, from lusty to unaffected and funerary. It touches upon the bee and the poppy's mutual awareness that their affair is short lived and empty, that the poppy's time is running out. After this line, the poem's action decompresses, until the speaker ends with a lingering remembrance of the poppy's "fling of abandon."
"And we could see nothing but her huge flop of petal,/ Her big, lewd, bold eye, its sooty lashes,/ And that stripped, athletic leg, hairy,/ In a fling of abandon—"
In the poem's final lines, the speaker anticipates the way the poppy will be remembered after her petals have fallen. Knowing the role that vision plays in Hughes' poetry, it is significant that the speaker, presumably male, could "see nothing" but the poppy's provocative features. His emphasis on the poppy's "flop of petal" (which corresponds to a woman's hair), her dark eye, and her bare leg (which corresponds to the poppy's stem), reduce the poppy from the "queen" of the first line to a collection of parts.
