Ordinary beauty
This poem's speaker tries urgently to draw the reader's attention to the beauty and poeticism of everyday life. The images of the poppies, the clouds, and the bleeding woman all evoke beauty and color in unexpected places. These exist in contrast to dullness and numbness. For the speaker, taking notice of ordinary beauty requires paying attention to strange, surprising detail—for instance, all three of these images are tied together because they are red, despite the fact that they are otherwise very different from one another. This attention to unconventional details allows the speaker not only to see various mundane objects as beautiful, but also allows for a sense of connection and even narrative interrelatedness between them.
Death
The speaker implies throughout the poem that beauty and death exist side-by-side—not as opposites but as an inextricable pair. One image of beauty is that of the woman in the ambulance, whose red blood the speaker links to the lovely red of poppies. The woman, therefore, is not simply beautiful despite her proximity to death, but, rather, is beautiful because she is in the midst of a brush with death. Furthermore, poppies themselves traditionally symbolize death: they are used to make opiates, which act as a sedative, and are also used to commemorate those killed at war. Therefore, the poem implies, beauty and death are related: both are visceral, intense, and arresting. They both stand in contrast to the numbing or monotonous, but not to one another.
Pollution and corruption
Though this poem's speaker is driven to an almost-desperate gratitude by the presence of poppies, the other people passing by don't seem to care. As the speaker points out, nobody has asked for the gift of poppies. In the poem's urban, twentieth-century setting, people seem numb to nature's beauty. Moreover, the forces of industry and capital are actively wrecking nature, allowing only vestiges (like the poppies) to shine through. Thus the sky is full of toxic gases, and the businessmen who walk by—represented by their characteristic bowler hats—are insensitive to flowers.
