It’s receding and as it moves past her mouth it makes her think of the sea and another world she used to belong to—one of life and health.Subscribe to our mailing list and get new poetry analysis updates straight to your inbox.We respect your privacy and take protecting it seriouslyEmma graduated from East Carolina University with a BA in English, minor in Creative Writing, BFA in Fine Art, and BA in Art Histories.

It also alludes to some of the larger complications in Plath’s life, those that led to her eventual suicide.In the following lines she compares the movements of the nurses as they pass her to “gulls” that “pass inland their white caps”. Every single person that visits PoemAnalysis.com has helped contribute, so thank you for your support. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. Please continue to help us support the fight against dementia.Subscribe to our mailing list to get the latest and greatest poetry updates.What's your thoughts?

‘Tulips’ by Sylvia Plath is a complex, infinitely layered poem that uses metaphors and similes to depict Plath’s time in the hospital. As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. Now, she has to contend with it all the time. Please support this website by adding us to your whitelist in your ad blocker.


That is, the world of life. She can explore less obvious emotions and how she connects bits of the world together. The feelings suggested by her description of the room are hibernation, dormancy, and detachment. The poem begins with the speaker noting the arrival of red tulips … These things identify her and are all that’s left when she is “swabbed” clear of her “loving associations”.As a cargo boat, and while continuing the image of water and its powers, Plath describes sinking into the anesthetic while watching her life move away from her. There was no fuss. Tulips are associated with the spring. The light, which thins and widens one a day casts her as “flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow”. While for some these would be welcome, for Plath they are a shocking and brutal reminder of a world she’d like to forget. She acknowledges “you,” the reader.One element that appeals to her about it is that it “asks nothing”.

Everything is quiet and still. The red colour of the flowers is then compared to “tongues” and “red lead sinkers”.

In the last lines she speaks about the dead, religion, and what it is like to finally have their peace.

It tries to save her, “out of sheer love for [her]”.The final line of the poem takes the reader once more back to the water.
Most critics seem to agree that she chooses the latter. This is part of the peace that she is finding.

The “air snags and eddies round them”. These lines reference death, specifically the purity and peacefulness of it. It is this that she’s trying to escape. These are the two main images that make up this first stanza.She glances around her, taking in the walls, the bed, her hands. Plath, as the “stupid pupil…has to take everything in”.

However, her ended marriage left her with two young children to care for and, she committed suicide by inhaling gas from a kitchen oven” ("Sylvia Plath"). The baby/tulips simile is a weird idea in the first place, and the fact … Traditionally, the word “image” is related to visual sights, things that a reader can imagine seeing, but imagery is much more than that. One has to move forward in order to comfortably resolve a phrase or sentence. Plath married Ted Hughes in 1956. Enjambment forces a reader down to the next line, and the next, quickly. She had grown used to the white purity of the space she resided it. Even their color reminds her of her wound, which implicitly suggests it reminds her of her past. She uses a simile to describe her position on the bed in lines one and two of this stanza. Yet on further readings we can see flashes and moments of rhyme and metre within the poem. The poem ‘Tulips’ by Sylvia Plath on a first reading may appear to have no real form in terms of rhyme scheme nor sense of structure. It is one the other side of the equation, juxtaposed against the white of the room and the numbness the nurses give her to ease the pain. In regards to the former, she explains “how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.” There, she is “nobody” amidst of a sea of faceless nurses who bring "no trouble." What attracts her to the sterility of the hospital room is that it allows her to ignore the complications and pains of living. Join the conversation by commenting She didn’t want to these loud, bright flowers, or the shock they brought her. Both of these techniques are examples of figurative language. They allow the poet to express something beyond the explicit. It refers to the eye, but also to a student. Yuck. It was originally published in “Tulips” is a rich and evocative poem. She notes how, in the first four stanzas of the poem, the speaker “[describes] the world of the hospital in the yearning tones of one who has already turned her back on it and knows it is slipping away,” and in the fifth, she begins referring to her wish to stay in the past tense. She is frequently numbed by medications, and has lost all of her "baggage." This is a comment on their colour in relation to everything else around her.Another important technique commonly used in poetry is enjambment. She says that to the nurses her body is a “pebble”.

The red tulips remind her of reality, life, and all that “weigh[s her] down”.

The speaker in the poem claims to understand the tulips as signifiers of a complicated sexual world intruding on the hallowed and clean white world of the hospital. She is thirty, but she has been stubborn in that which she’s held onto. The spell of the hospital room is broken.” In other words, she comes to realize that life is her natural state, and that she will fight for it instinctively in the way her heart beats instinctively.


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