Summary
The speaker continues to enumerate all the people and things that did not expect, or ask for, bright red poppies in October. One of these things is the sky, which is grey and toxic, blighted by carbon monoxide and industrial waste. Another is the lifeless eyes of passing people, hidden by bowler hats.
The speaker then addresses God, asking what they have done to deserve the unseasonable gift of the poppies on this early, cold, blue morning.
Analysis
The image of the poppies continues to be the thread tying the poem together in its second half, but the images here differ wildly from those in the first two stanzas. The images of stanzas one and two are natural and even primal: blood, clouds, sun. Even the ambulance, a decidedly modern image, is still in that raw, bodily category—it's inextricable from the medical crises associated with it. The images of stanzas three and four are drawn from a twentieth-century world of business, industry, and capitalism. Thus, we come to see that the poppies are valuable to the speaker precisely because they represent a kind of lost world, one that is both peacefully rustic and thrillingly intense. At the same time, because the speaker's setting is urban and colorless, the other people present don't seem to value the poppies very much.
At first, the speaker contrasts the poppies with the sky, using the adverb "palely" to describe it. But, while it first seems as if this is going to be a simple juxtaposition of a late-autumn sky to a springtime flower, it's soon clear that the divide runs deeper. The phrase "igniting its carbon monoxides" implies that the sky no longer quite belongs in the realm of the natural world. It's not just a wintry sky, in other words. It's a smoggy, industrial one. The words "carbon monoxides," taken from the lexicon of science, intrude on the poem, mimicking the unwelcome intrusion of industry on nature.
Next, Plath draws our attention to "bowlers." This is a reference to bowler hats, a favorite wardrobe choice of London businessmen in Plath's midcentury period. Using metonymy to represent this group of people via their clothes, Plath points out that the businessmen's eyes are dulled, unable to adequately perceive the flowers before them. Though the formally dressed men evoke a very different milieu than the flaming, smoggy sky, Plath prompts readers to see the relationship between them: both are linked to a kind of emotionally muted, money-focused urban world cut off from the physicality the poppies represent.
The poem's final lines are enigmatic, even contradictory. The speaker expresses gratitude for the flowers, metaphorically comparing them to mouths that "cry open." The verb "cry" is a broad and multifaceted one, potentially referring to a joyful shout, but simultaneously connoting a cry of sadness or pain. That ambiguity is well-suited to the speaker's mood, since their experience of beauty seems merely to make them more aware of the mundanity around them (and vice versa). The speaker then contrasts these flowers to a "forest of frost" and a "dawn of cornflowers." These are odd, surprising images, because we already know that the flowers aren't surrounded by a frosty forest or a field of cornflowers. However, these images let Plath strike a surprising balance as the poem comes to a close. Ice and cornflowers (which are blue flowers) both visually contrast with the warm, red poppies, allowing the poem to emphasize the idea that the poppies stand out from their surroundings. However, these images of a fertile, natural world are very different from the images of urban lifelessness we've just seen, implying that the speaker has somehow been transported by the poppies, at least mentally, and now feels more connected to the natural world.
