Summary
The speaker begins the poem by comparing the poppies mentioned in the title to the red clouds of sunrise. The clouds are not as magnificent as the poppies, the speaker reports. Neither is the heart of a woman in an ambulance, who is bleeding so hard that she has soaked through her coat. The poppies are no less than a gift—in fact, they're a kind of surprise. Nobody, including the sky, ever asked for them.
Analysis
One glance at these opening lines shows that this will be a spare, impressionistic poem. Plath paints a picture here with broad brushstrokes, encouraging us to explore the connections between seemingly disparate phenomena. She calls up the image of a blood-red heart and a sun-tinted cloud, asking us to compare both of these things to the poppies in the title. It's a fascinating, paradoxical maneuver. Plath never explicitly connects any of these images. We don't, in fact, even know where the speaker stands in relation to these objects. But these images don't feel like a list of unrelated, lonely items. Instead, precisely because she leaves it up to our imaginations, Plath implies a kind of spiritual connection between these things. The poem is full of white space, giving the reader a kind of visual freedom to compare and contrast the poem's images.
In the end, after performing that comparison, readers will see that these objects are superficially connected on one level—they're all red. But because the speaker refers to the poppies as a "love gift," readers are encouraged to see this deeper, stranger connection. It's not hard to see why someone would refer to brightly colored poppies or clouds as a gift, but the idea of a bleeding woman as a gift might prompt some puzzlement. Is the speaker implying that the woman's life has been a gift? Does the phrase "love gift" connote pregnancy, indicating that the woman is having a miscarriage or childbirth-related emergency? Or does the phrase simply mean that, despite her desperate situation, there's something objectively beautiful and valuable about her red blood? It's highly ambiguous, but it is precisely because Plath doesn't tell us what to think, and merely guides us to examine these relationships, that readers can access such a range of interpretations.
The speaker is revealed only through what they notice. We know little about their identity—not even their gender. But they seem to have an eye for beauty, albeit in an unconventional way. They come across as somewhat childlike, in part because of that unconventionality—they don't seem to have a sense of what people traditionally find beautiful, or even what they typically think of as related phenomena. At the same time, their thoughtful, pensive tone gives the impression of a much older person. Regardless, through the negative space formed by these images, we get the impression that the speaker is standing on a city street in the morning, stopping to look at poppies while an ambulance rushes by.
