Summary
In the poem's final stanzas, the speaker anticipates the way the poppy will be remembered. In a fond, though funerary, tone, he predicts that the poppy will be spoken of for her extravagant, made-up appearance and immodest sexuality. He emphasizes her hair, referring to the poppy's petals, her dark eye, and her "stripped, athletic, hairy" leg, or her long stem. The poem ends in suspension, as though the speaker is picturing the poppy in her prime before she has even shed her petals.
Analysis
The poem continues in the future tense, with the speaker looking away from the present moment and anticipating an almost gossipy eulogy that he and others will make after the poppy sheds her petals. Significantly, the speaker predicts that he could "see nothing" but the poppy's extravagant, eroticized features. The flower will not be remembered for her briefly-mentioned offspring, but for the most striking elements of her appearance.
By asserting that the poppy "wore herself in her hair, in her day," the speaker echoes the poppy's initial regal image. This evokes the sense of a woman who carried herself with confidence and pride, who didn't care if anyone objected to her lavish appearance. This continues into the next line, when the speaker imagines that the poppy's petals were the first feature people noticed when they gazed upon her. Then, the speaker hyperbolically describes the poppy's eye, creating the image of a woman who wore dark, heavy makeup around her lashes. Finally the speaker ends on an image of the poppy's stem, likened to a woman's leg. The words he chooses for this description—"stripped, athletic, hairy"— keep the metaphor grounded in reality, strengthening the connection between the poppy's fuzzy stem and a woman's unshaven leg.
By allowing the last line to linger on the poppy's "fling of abandon," the speaker concludes with a playful tone that contrasts with the poem's grave eroticism. After all of the metaphors that stem from the poppy throughout the poem, including queen, virgin, and mother, the poppy ultimately ends as a symbol of sexual intrigue. The speaker and others will remember her for the striking flower she once was, a wild thing by the "trim garden's edge." Her interaction with the bee, which triggers the speaker's early eulogy, signifies the last fling of a fading, beautiful woman who still has a few tricks up her sleeve.
While the speaker's prediction may be an amusing way to end the poem, we should notice what kind of image the poem, as a whole, produces of a woman. Although the poem on the literal level is about a bee who pollinates a flower, the metaphorical and symbolic resonances of this interaction, combined with the poem's language, denies either character an identity. This connects sexual behavior in the natural world to purely erotic human relationships; ultimately, the poppy's value is entirely limited to her appeal as a sexual object. As soon her petals fall—or, on the metaphorical level, as soon as the woman she represents ceases to be attractive—her value is lost, too.
