By Heather Bolen

Sylvia Plath on a city street wearing a scarf in her hair — Image courtesy of @sylviaplathpoetry

For centuries, tulips have been referenced in literature, often symbolizing beauty, love, transience, or economic speculation.

Of the many examples of tulips in literature, the poem “Tulips” by Sylvia Plath holds a special place in my literary heart. The poem is haunting and emotional, one in which tulips are personified and given such a powerful and central presence that they function almost like characters. They act upon the speaker, influence her emotions, and drive the poem's narrative.

Written in 1961, “Tulips” is a free-verse poem in which Plath uses tulips as symbols of disturbance to her peace and recovery in a hospital room after an appendectomy. She initially named it “Sickroom Tulips in Hospital” but later shortened the title.

Sylvia Plath's poetic life is one long battle between two forces, the oblivion of death and the responsibility of life. “Tulips” is no exception. Critics think it played an important role as a precursor to Plath's novel The Bell Jar, as both speaker and protagonist seek the pureness of death.

Throughout the poem there’s this idea that the speaker feels herself to be inanimate - a nobody, like an eye, or pebble, or cargo boat, or nun, and finally a cut-paper shadow. In contrast, the tulips have arrived to re-animate life and return the speaker to the world of blood, flesh, and tears.

The tulips are dynamic, exerting a forceful presence that impacts the speaker's state of mind. They are both beautiful and jarring, their red color standing out starkly against the white surroundings of the hospital and seeming to demand attention. They are described in vivid detail and seem to have a life and intent of their own. For instance, they are described as "excitable" and "too red in the first place," and they "breathe" and "hurt" the speaker with their brightness.

Stanza six is unusual in that each line focuses on the all-important and harmful tulips, their redness hurting, their ability to communicate disturbing. The tulips are becoming stronger and taking on a life of their own. They are likened to an awful baby, they float and yet weigh heavily on the speaker's heart and soul.

The seventh stanza further delves into the idea of the tulips taking on a lifelike presence. They seem to observe the speaker as she grapples with her own sense of self, caught in the tug of war between two contrasting realms. The tulips both accompany and oppose her, even when she wishes to detach from her existence. They consume her oxygen, and she finds herself struggling against the vibrant affirmation of life that these blossoms symbolize.

It seems the red is too loud and she cannot ignore this vibrant, forceful energy.

By the end, in stanza nine, the tulips evolve, or rather, morph into creatures. These flowers take on a menacing and threatening presence, exuding such intense heat that it seems to warm the surrounding walls. The poet's mind races, conjuring the image of an African cat's mouth while simultaneously visualizing her heart pulsing, striving to grasp onto life. Yet, also there’s a likening of her heart to a bowl of red blooms and acknowledgment that her heart continues to beat, continues to feel, out of love for her very existence. In other words, tulips represent self-love or self-acceptance.

Tulips

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free——
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.