Tulips By Sylvia Plath

The poem "Tulips" can be summarized as one of Sylvia Plath's hospital experiences. As expressed in the poem, she yearns for freedom. The freedom is not from slavery or death but from life itself. Her melancholy tone is because life for her has become so unbearable that she eagerly awaits death. Using personifications throughout the poem, Sylvia Plath contrasts her life to tulips.

The tulips in the poem symbolize life. Their red, vibrant colors tease her that they are happy and bright while she is lifeless and sick. The color red is also the opposite of the color white which represents Plath's emotions and feelings. The tulips represent warmth and spring. They disrupt her peace and quiet. As she is lying in the hospital bed, she mentions that she is "learning peacefulness" and the tulips take that away from her. The poem suggests that she may have had a troubled past. Due to this possible trauma, she wants to escape and take a leap into oblivion. Even though she is alive, she is lifeless. She wants to abandon everything as she mentions that she has given "her name and day-clothes up to the nurses, the history to the anesthetist and her body to the surgeons." In the poem, Sylvia Plath also compares herself to pebbles. Since pebbles are just lifeless, inert objects she feels that she can relate to them. She mentions that the nurses tend to her like water tends to pebbles. The nurses try to smooth her wounds. She also likes the fact that the nurses "bring me numbness in their bright needles." Even though she is slowly losing herself, the needles calm her down and taker away her pain. She wants to be cleansed and purified when death embraces her. She knows that she is ready for that. However, when she looks at the picture of her husband and child she is reminded of her love for them. That love is preventing her to escape life. She perceives herself as a "thirty year-old cargo" and that the doctors and nurses have "swabbed" her clean. She thinks that when she is cleaned everyday her turmoil and pain is also being cleansed away. She feels pure when she mentions "I am a nun now." When she says that "the water went over my head" she implies that her soul is being cleansed that way. It seems that Plath is almost caught in between her decision to embrace death or to embrace life. If she decides to choose death, she is finally free and she is at her purest form but she has to say goodbye to her husband and child. However, if she chooses to live she is trapped in her solitude, in her lifeless body. This decision tears her apart as it is hard for her to choose one over the other. Sylvia Plath goes on to use personification again to talk about how torturing the tulips are. She can "hear them breathe. Their redness talks to my wounds, it corresponds. They weigh me down." Before she slipped into oblivion, no one watched her. Now the tulips seem to do just the opposite. She sees herself as a "cut paper shadow between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips." It seems that when the tulips