"Tulips" by Sylvia Plath

Most people enjoy small gifts like flowers when they are stuck in the hospital. But for Sylvia Plath, a dozen red tulips scream at her and threaten to cut off her supply of oxygen, disturbing the peacefulness she feels as she lies in a hospital bed watching nurses pass by day by day.

Plath wrote “Tulips” in 1961 while bedridden after a miscarriage and an appendectomy. For those who aren’t familiar with her work, let me explain: this seems to be one of the greatest things that has ever happened to her. Plath’s work is loaded with themes of death, the unglamorousness of motherhood and the loss of identity. Her poems very openly express her clinical depression and longing for death.

Being stuck in the hospital is a nice little retreat for her. “How free it is, you have no idea how free/ the peacefulness is so big it begins to daze you,” she writes. She feels free from her family obligations and other aspects of her daily life; here she is alone with her thoughts and the occasional nurse that stops by to give her an injection. The peacefulness “asks nothing” of her, save the intermittent need to state her name of make small talk with nurses.

She describes the whiteness of the hospital as wintery and snowed-in. It bring her closer to her favorite thing (death) as she recognizes that the hospital is “what the dead close in on, finally; I imagine them/ shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.”  Going under for surgery was also a death-like experience for her:

“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.”

Yet she is disturbed by the belongings in her room that remind her of her home life: her suitcase and her framed family photo. She describes her husband and child’s smiles as catching onto her skin like tiny hooks. And most of all, she hates the bouquet of tulips. She didn’t want any flowers in the first place; she writes that “I only wanted /To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.”

The tulips threaten to fill that emptiness; she says they are so red they hurt her. They are a contrast to the stark, wintery white of the hospital. She swears she can hear them breathing through their wrapping, “like an awful baby.” This is a reminder that she must eventually return to caring for children and her other duties. The tulips are taunting, almost haunting her, as she states they are “a dozen red lead sinkers around my neck.”

It seems that the tulips threaten the speaker because they are so much more excitable than her. They are vibrant with color and full of life, while she is lifeless and still. The poem personifies the tulips and speaker to the point that both are unfamiliar to the reader. The tulips are demonic presence that “should be behind bars like dangerous animals.” The speaker is nothing but “flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow.”  She is an empty shell of a being, or a cargo boat letting all of its belongings and watching them sink along with the boat, as she writes.

In the end the tulips win the battle, as the speaker’s heart “opens and closes/ its bowl of sheer red blooms out of love for me.” This is reminiscent of Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of Plath’s novel The Bell Jar attempting to drown herself. As Esther (who is a thinly-veiled representation of the author herself) swims out to sea and tries with all her might to hold her breath underwater until she passes out. Yet her own natural buoyancy overtakes her and brings her to the surface each time. She writes that as she breached the surface each time she “listened to the old brag of her heart: I am, I am, I am.”

The tulips symbolize what Plath perceives as the antagonizing of her beating heart. She feels her heart beat in her chest, reminding her she is the opposite of what she wants to be. Death is “a country as far away as health.” As desperately as she wants to reach it she is always held back, and as she gets the closest she has ever felt to death, she is interrupted by a pesky little red gift from her husband.