In "Poppies in October," Sylvia Plath carefully builds up a symbolic vocabulary around flowers. Poppies, here, come to symbolize liveliness and vitality, while cornflowers take on a more mysterious resonance, implying a certain hope and restfulness. At the same time, Plath is working with a preexisting set of symbols around flowers. Before she chose to include poppies in her poem, they were already understood in the western world to symbolize death, rest, and sleep. Poppies, meanwhile, are only one of the flowers to have assumed larger-than-life symbolism in history. Here, we'll examine a few different eras, discussing the symbolic visual language of flowers across these different historical settings.
In Ancient Greece, flowers were often linked to mythology, creating a set of floral symbols linked to underlying narratives. Indeed, the poppy's status as a symbol of sleep and death can be traced all the way back to Ancient Greece. Meanwhile, oral narratives held that the red anemone flower was linked to the mythical Adonis. While hunting, Adonis was killed by a boar. The goddess Aphrodite, one of his lovers, saw him bleeding and watched anemones spring up where his blood fell. In a somewhat similar story, a young man named Hyacinthus was killed by a discus. A flower grew from the ground where his blood had fallen, and the god Apollo, who had loved Hyacinthus, named the flower hyacinth after him. In the most famous instance of floral symbolism emerging from Greek myth, a man named Narcissus caught sight of his reflection in a pool of water and became so enamored with his own appearance that he died while examining it. At the site grew the flower known as the narcissus. Thus, in Greek myth, flowers have a complex and narratively rooted symbolism, often linked to masculinity, beauty, and death: they tend to symbolize the moments wherein youthful beauty or vitality collide with mortality.
After the spread of Christianity, flowers assumed new symbolism, influenced by previous worldviews and cultures—including that of Ancient Greece—but with a uniquely Christian spin. Thus the anemone flower remained linked, as in Ancient Greece, to the death of a young man. In Christian iconography, however, the man was Jesus rather than Adonis, and Jesus's wounds on the cross were often symbolized by or even depicted as anemone flowers. Medieval Christians also granted a floral symbol to Jesus's mother, Mary—in her case a lily, specifically intended to symbolize virginity and purity. In this case, the symbol was rooted in ancient Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, where the Lily tended to symbolize femininity, fertility, and purity. Medieval depictions of the annunciation (the moment in which the angel Gabriel informed Mary that she would bear a child) often depict Gabriel handing her a lily, symbolizing the combined virginity and fertility of the immaculate conception.
Meanwhile, in Victorian cultures, floral symbolism assumed unprecedented intricacy—and this intricacy coexisted with a flourishing interest in household horticulture. Many households kept reference books to keep track of floral symbolism, and the wealthy often maintained greenhouses in their homes. Poppies, to a great extent, continued to stand for sleep and dreams. It was not until decades later, following the first world war, that they came to be associated with wartime deaths. Meanwhile, for Victorians, bluebells symbolized kindness and ivy friendship. Roses symbolized love, with various colors of rose signifying gradations and types of love ranging from admiration to desire to purity. Other flowers, however, had less positive associations. Aloe was associated with bitterness, and passionflower with mourning.
One reason that "Poppies in October" is such a layered and complex poem, suggesting a wide range of emotions and associations even while portraying a relatively simple scene, is because it includes a variety of symbolically loaded images. A reader with no knowledge of floral folklore or symbolism can easily enjoy reading the poem, but knowledge of those topics can make the reading experience richer, suggesting a broad range of emotions from grief to exhaustion to transcendence.
