2.6–Sylvia Plath, “Tulips”

Link to Full Text

https://poets.org/poem/diving-wreck

Poem Overview

“Tulips” was published in Plath’s last volume of poetry, titled Ariel (published in 1965, two years after Plath’s after death in 1963). Deborah Suiter Gentry, in Dying is an Art: Suicide in the Works of Kate Chopin and Sylvia Plath, offers a useful overview of the poem and its context: “[‘Tulips’ was] written ten days after Plath left the hospital in February in 1961 following an appendectomy. According to her husband, Ted Hughes, it was her ‘first spontaneous poem. She wrote it quickly, without recourse to her thesaurus, and it combines exactness of observation with the subjectivity of her hidden, deeper voice’ (qyd. In Stevenson 210). The poem describes a woman in the hospital who identifies with the whiteness and sterility of the setting with purification and death. A gift of red tulips is seen as marring the mood with a violent burst of color associated with assertiveness and life. The woman sees the tulips as forcing her unwillingly back to life.” (79).

Author Bio

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer whose work has had a profound impact on contemporary literature. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Plath demonstrated literary talent from a young age, publishing her first poem at 8. She attended Smith College and later studied at Cambridge University on a Fulbright Scholarship, where she met and married poet Ted Hughes.

Plath’s writing is renowned for its intense emotion and exploration of themes such as identity, mental illness, and the role of women in society. Her most famous works include the semi-autobiographical novel “The Bell Jar” (1963) and the poetry collection “Ariel” (1965), both published posthumously. Plath’s struggle with depression and her turbulent marriage to Hughes significantly influenced her work.

Tragically, Sylvia Plath’s life was cut short when she died by suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. Despite her brief life, her writing continues to resonate with readers and scholars, cementing her legacy as a powerful voice in 20th-century literature.

Major Themes

1. On Confessional Poetry

Plath is generally placed in the genre of “confessional poetry,” which can be broadly defined as a genre of poetry that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, characterized by its focus on the poet’s personal experiences, emotions, and inner life. This style is known for its raw and intimate exploration of topics such as mental illness, trauma, relationships, and personal identity. Confessional poets often use their own life stories as material, blending autobiography with poetic form to create a sense of direct, personal communication with the reader.

In other words, confessional poetry is built around depicting the very personal, yet its proponents contend that it has universal implication: confessional poetry, they contend, hopes to show the general by depicting the very personal. The genre has received both praise and scorn: those who praise it remark on its rawness and honesty. For those who criticize it, commentary surfaces about an unnecessary, and unproductive, level of self-involvement. Much controversy continues in regard to confessional poetry. As you read Plath, I suggest thinking about whether you find her intense self-focus to be useful. Is Plath challenging the boundary between the personal and the public for some larger purpose? Not? What follows from either choice?  Other considerations to keep in mind: the use of first-person–how does the poetic “I” affect the poem’s audience? How about personal trauma and the ethics of drawing on such experiences in the artistic process: what is the impact on the poet? On the reader?  For more, see Poetry Foundation’s website titled “Confessional Poetry” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/151109/an-introduction-to-confessional-poetry) and The Academy of American Poets site called “A Brief Guide to Confessional Poetry” (https://poets.org/text/brief-guide-confessional-poetry)

2. On the color red, and its connections with the color white

The color red appears throughout “Tulips.” Significantly, red appears throughout the entire volume Ariel, functioning differently depending on the poem. For example, in another of the volume’s poems (titled “Lady Lazarus’) Plath writes “I rise with my red hair, and eat men like air.” In that particular case, according to Gentry, red is a sign of aggression and empowerment. Plath also uses red in the poem “Sting,” where she associates it with a powerful queen bee. She writes: [… ]flying/More terrible then she ever was, red/Scar in the sky, red comet/Over the engine that killer her—(56-59).

Gentry makes another strong point, as she writes on the color red in women’s writing, in general: “Red is a highly symbolic color in the writings of women. White represents women’s outward passivity and purity in conformation to patriarchal culture, but red represents the creative life force within, the menstrual flow symbolic of the mature woman. Red and while appear over and over in Plath’s poems like the turning of a barber’s pole, as Plath is torn between what she perceives as he duty and her individuality” (79).

One way to think of the colors in “Tulips” is to follow a shift from the white of the poem’s opening to the red of its conclusion. With that in mind, let’s think about the following:

Early parts of the poem speak mainly of white.  Plath write “how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed in,” for example, and “the light of these white walls.” Additionally, white (as in the traditional uniform nurses wear) is implicit in reference to nurses walking by and the color also shows up in Plath’s image of an eye,  as she puts it, with “two white lids that will nto shut.  It’s an unsettling image, one that calls up thoughts of the frozen, sterile, perhaps even that which is not alive. While there are many more occasions that can be cited regarding the use of “white,” and much more that can be said of its myriad implications, it seems that Plath, in is working with ideas similar to the “passivity” that Gentry spots regarding white in Plath’s poetry, Arguably, however, these uses of white, once that were among the last words Plath wrote, take that passivity and find something much stronger and more forceful in it. white. Arguably, white in “Tulips” is the white of sterility, winter, frozenness—in fact, the white of a life on hold, in stasis.

As “Tulips” reaches its conclusion, red takes over. The references are numerous, but here are a few lines:

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.

Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.

A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.

There are many interpretations of how Plath is using red. One is that the red has a living quality and is associated with the body. As Susan Bassnett puts it, “the redness of the tulips gradually forces the I/speaker to leave her death-in-life state” (212, “Poetry and Survival”). Building on Bassnetts astute point, we can follow how Plath’s uses of red seem connected with embodied experience even if that living experience is dangerous and frightening). These red tulips “hurt,” for instance; they “eat my oxygen” and are “sinkers” around the speaker’s neck. But, because they are clearly associated with the speaker’s “heart” and even with “sheer love,” they do carry a reminder of what red, and the associated embodied living, could be.

Concluding statements on color imagery: Plath’s color imagery could be read as akin to a theme in much literature written by women: women writers reversing the traditions that have come before. If white has previously represented women’s purity (think of the loaded symbol of the wedding dress), Plath finds in it just the opposite: sterility and a state near death. Red, while more complicated in its trajectory, functions in a similar manner: red, traditionally, signifies passion and love (red roses as the consummate example), but for Plath red may well be related to life and passion, yet that life seems loaded with threats of death.

3. On Plath’s use of unexpected imagery/similes/metaphors

Poet and scholar Kenneth Koch, in his masterful study of poetry titled Making Your Own Days, explains that the great poem will have imagery that goes far beyond overused phrases such as “red as a rose.” It is far better to look for the unexpected pairings, Koch explains. In them is the element of surprise that enable fresh thinking.

Plath’s imagery, throughout “Tulips” creates surprising juxtapositions. Here are just a few examples (with brainstormed commentary afterwards)

Example 1

• My husband and child smiling out of the family photo, /  Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
  • Commentary on the above: This is one of the poem’s most shocking images—Plath is here comparing her husband and children to “little smiling hooks.” In other words, they prick and they hurt. It seems that Plath is here turning traditional markers of femininity upside down. In those traditional, inherited formulations, the love of spouse and love of children is a chief marker of woman, of that which is designated as “the feminine.” Plath seems to be challenging, in a shocking way, those inherited formulations.

Example 2

• a thirty-year-old cargo boat   
  • Commentary on the above: Another shocking image—a body like a cargo boat, and remember that cargo boat carry baggage—potentially important if we realize that this line follows immediately after “little smiling hooks.”

Example 3

• like an awful baby.  
  • Commentary on the above: There it is again—the domestic seems threatening in this poem.

Critical Context

Pederson, Michael Karlsson. “Sylvia Plath’s ‘Tulips’: On the Hostile Nature of Things.” How Literature Comes to Matter. eds. Sten Pultz Moslund, Marlene Karlsson Marcussen

Thesis paragraph:

I would like in this chapter to tap into this discussion of the status of things in Sylvia Plath’s late poetry, which I do not read symbolically either (as if they stood for something else), but rather as things with their own ontology, a specific and autonomous state of being not governed only by human presence and mastery. Perloff makes a strong case for Plath’s sensibility to nonhuman life and objects, but her method of reading never transcends the metaphysical divide between subject and object, which to my mind does not do justice to Plath’s poetry. Instead I would like to qualify the discussion of things by developing a more informed and therefore consequent thing-oriented reading of her poetry based on post-anthropocentric theory, whose basic interest is to challenge and ultimately get rid of the dominant view in Western philosophy that the human subject enjoys ontological supremacy in regard to other things and beings. As such, my reading of Plath is also an attempt at showing how recent ontological theories of things and matter can be a fruitful platform for analysing and understanding literature. I find here that the Heideggerian tradition of emphasising the non-relational aspects of things, which is continued and further developed in Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology, is an especially productive way of opening Plath’s poems. I will elaborate on this ontological theory of the thing in the next section.

Earnshaw, Owen. “Mood, Delusions, and Poetry: Emotional ‘Wording of the World’ in Psychosis, Philosophy and the Everyday.” Philosophia, vol. 45, no. 4, 2017.

Article Abstract:

Starting from a comparison of the similarities between a poem by Sylvia Plath called Tulips and the words of someone in the thrall of a delusion I develop a phenomenology of how mood is basic to our articulation of the world. To develop this argument I draw on Heidegger’s (1962) concept of attunement [befindlichkeit] and his contention that basic emotions open up aspects of the world for closer inspection and articulation. My thesis in this paper is that there is an underlying structural similarity between the forms of words used in poems and those found in medically diagnosed delusions and this similarity is based on the role of mood in both arenas. The difference, I argue, is that although both forms of articulation are negotiated ‘as if’ the subject matter was literal, the person writing the poem is self-aware that their uses of language are figurative and metaphorical. This is because the emotional lens they use to describe a situation poetically can always be removed by a return to a ground-mood of acceptance, that prevents them from becoming lost in the poetical mood. The person experiencing psychosis, on the other hand, is unable to extricate herself from the mood that underlies their delusional utter[1]ances as they have lost access to the ground-mood that the poet takes for granted. I illustrate the point using Hume’s famous statement about the mood he philosophises in and look at ways sufferers from delusions could regain a sense of the non-literal projections of their words.

Bonus Content: “Why Should You Read Sylvia Plath?” (Video)