📖 Key Terms

📖 Key Terms

Extended metaphor

A comparison that runs through a whole poem or a large section of it, rather than appearing just once. Weir uses sewing and textile craft as an extended metaphor for the mother’s grief — the vocabulary of making and construction runs from the poppy’s pin to the “tucks, darts, pleats” in her stomach.

Semantic field

A cluster of words drawn from the same area of meaning. Weir uses a semantic field of touch and the body (“graze”, “pressed”, “trace”, “bandaged”) to show that the mother’s grief is felt physically rather than thought intellectually.

Ambiguity

When something can be understood in more than one way. The poem keeps the son’s fate deliberately ambiguous — we do not know if he is dead or away. The poppy carries ambiguity too: it is a gift of love and a Remembrance symbol simultaneously.

First-person voice

When a poem uses “I” as its speaker. Weir uses a first-person maternal voice to position the reader inside the mother’s experience. This is a formal argument: war is understood from the inside of a domestic space, not from a distance.

Enjambment

When a sentence or phrase runs from one line to the next without a pause. Weir uses enjambment across the poem to create a breathless, continuous quality — as if the mother’s thoughts cannot be contained in neat units. The run-on lines perform the difficulty of holding everything together.