'I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses', Plath says, 'And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to the surgeons'. If the supersensitive mind can turn tulips into explosions, it can also reverse the process and turn dangerous animals into blooming hearts. Tulip Poems Home Poems Flower Poems Tulip Poems. She has moved beyond normal activity, and relishes the opportunity to relinquish all responsibility, to become a 'body' with no personal identity: I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the, And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to. Condensation, catachresis, metonymy, and the verbal strategies of riddles and allusive jokes: all these and more are devices both to record and to ward off the numbing that results when ordinary consciousness is faced with an overwhelmingly fragmented objective world, a flood of facticity that simply will not submit to tenderness or mercy. Tulips in the poem stand for “feigned empathy”.
What is more, this contrary impulse drawing her back into the world and identification 'corresponds' to something in herself. . I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books. "Tulips" is an unusual poem for Plath because it does move inward toward a silent center and out again.

Her freedom is both wonderful and terrible because the price is so high. Figuratively speaking, Otherness may only serve as a catalyst for white inspection once it is safely ensconced behind bars. The nurses' tending in the third stanza is matched by the tulips' watching in the seventh. Tulips are usually associated with perfect love, and each color carries a specific significance: Red means true love, purple means royalty. But the Internet revolution, for all its speculative excesses, really is changing the world.

Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe. The verse is nominally free but has a subtle iambic base; the lines, seven to each stanza, move quietly and mellifluously; and a sense of hidden melody ('learning' / 'lying', 'lying by myself quietly', 'light lies', 'white walls') transforms apparently casual remarks into memorable speech. Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. Even more unusual than this acceptance of self-loss is the process of reversal, where the mind gradually takes hold again after the grim recognition that the tulips' "redness talks to my wound, it corresponds." The poem dramatizes a sick state, making it clear that it is sickness. This axiom still putatively left room for individual poets to develop personal styles and remain recognizably confessional. Her earlier efforts to train her vision outward, toward the landscape, and to concentrate on realistic details, as well as her very early apprenticeship in set forms combine with the Yaddo exercises in spontaneous associative creation to prepare her for her final poems, of which "Tulips" was the first example. The speaker herself seems surprised by her own gifts and ends the poem on a tentative note, moving toward the far-away country of health. Rose Poems Daffodil Poems Daisy Poems Dandelion Poems Lily Poems Violet Poems Iris Poems Sunflower Poems … The poet Ted Hughes states that the poem was written when Sylvia Plath had suffered miscarriage and had to be hospitalized for appendectomy in March of 1961. Not tulips but death is the gift she wants, as in "A Birthday Present" (Ariel), but in both cases the irony is that the gift is life.

Copyright © 1990 by the Longman Group UK Limited. She suggests that she might elude the seductiveness of the tulips should she become a nun and regain purity. . "Tulips" is not a cheerful poem, but it does move from cold to warmth, from numbness to love, from empty whiteness to vivid redness, in a process manipulated by the associative imagination. The flowers are hateful, as emblems of cruel spring, as presents from the healthy world that wants her back, as suspect, like all presents. Adam Cohen. The openness to experience that some regard as one of the hallmarks of American literature becomes, in Plath's poetry, an ironically balanced pointer that can tip toward either salvation or annihilation. Significantly, the body that drifts into erasure in "Tulips" is a white body in a white world, a body confronted with entrapment in or escape from its own powerful signifiers. Flowers heal me. From White Women Writing White: H. D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Whiteness. Such beautiful flowers deserves gorgeous poems of their own, and in this section you’ll be able to find them or add to the colorful list. White equals forgiveness and yellow cheerfulness. . Fixity, in these terms, is life; flight is immolation; freedom is the immediate metaphor of the hospital and the ultimate metamorphosis of death. The comic, almost spitting disgust of the assonance in the phrase "stupid pupil" adds to the allusive parody of Emerson's "'transparent eyeball" from Nature. She would have to sacrifice the peacefulness of whiteness. The control of "Tulips" -- the matching of stanzas, the correspondences developed between the external object and states of consciousness -- marks a new stage in Plath's development.

The speaker herself seems surprised by her own gifts and ends the poem on a tentative note, moving toward the far-away country of health. The world of the hospital ward is a welcome one of snowy whiteness and silence, in which the woman grasps eagerly at the ability to relax completely because nothing is required of her. It is the country she as to return to, reluctant though she is: the identification of the breathing, opened, red, spring-like tulips with her heart makes this plain.