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“Tulips” Introduction
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Sylvia Plath wrote "Tulips" in March of 1961, after having her appendix removed and receiving get-well flowers from a friend. The speaker of the poem, hospitalized for an unspecified procedure, feels torn between her desire to stay in the peaceful world of the hospital and the need to return to the demands of normal life. More subtly, she feels competing urges to get well and remain sick, or even to live and die. A bouquet of get-well tulips, with its "loud" blood-red color, comes to represent the pain and vividness of life itself. "Tulips" was first published in The New Yorker in 1962 and collected posthumously in Ariel (1965).
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“Tulips” Summary
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The red of these tulips seems too loud and intense for this quiet, wintry setting. Look at how blank and serene things are here, as if covered in snow. I'm learning how to be serene; I'm staying as still as the light bathing these blank walls, this hospital bed, my own hands. I'm anonymous; I don't have any connection to the tulips' explosive red color. I've surrendered control of my clothing and identity to the nursing staff, surrendered my past to the specialist who gives me anesthesia, and surrendered my body to the doctors who operate on me.
These hospital workers have placed my head between a white pillow and bedsheet, like an eye between two pale eyelids fixed wide open. Like the helpless pupil of an eye (or a dim-witted student), my head has no choice but to process whatever it's exposed to. Nurses come and go and don't cause me any problems. Wearing white caps, they look like seagulls flying by. They all do manual tasks and look identical, so I have no idea how many of them work here.
They take care of my body as gently as flowing water smooths small stones in its path. They bring me injections that make me numb and drowsy. Now that I've lost my normal life, I'm sick of everything that was weighing me down: my black leather travel bag like a container for medications; my husband and child, who are smiling in a photo by my hospital bed. Their smiles seem to snag me like hooks.
I've let so much go; I'm like a thirty-year-old freighter ship that's empty of everything but my name and address, which I'm holding onto tightly. The hospital staff has washed me clean of everything I cared about. Naked and afraid on the green gurney with plastic pillows, I left behind my personal items—tea service, dressers full of linen, books—and slipped out of consciousness as if going underwater. Now, for the first time, I feel as pure as a nun.
I never asked for any get-well flowers; I just wanted to lie back, palms up, and feel nothing at all. You have no idea how liberating this experience is. The sense of calm is stunning, and all it asks in return is a name tag and a few other small items. This calm is what dying people experience in the end; I picture them swallowing it like a wafer in the Catholic rite of Communion.
The tulips are too red, anyway—so red, they hurt. I thought I could hear them breathing through their white wrapping paper, like some terrible baby in swaddling clothes. Their redness matches and seems to interact with the redness of my surgical scar. They're complex: even though they seem to drift on the air, they feel heavy to me, their red tongue-like petals weighing on my mind like a bunch of lead weights on my shoulders.
I felt alone before, but now I feel as if the tulips are watching me. Their heads turn toward me, and toward the window where the sunlight gradually strengthens and fades each day. I feel silly and lacking in depth, like a shadow-thin paper doll, positioned between the sun's "eye" and the flowers' "eyes." I seem to have no identity; I’ve been wanting to get rid of my identity. The lively flowers seem to steal the air I breathe.
Before I got the tulips, the air here was pretty peaceful: I’d inhale and exhale it without any problems. But these red flowers seem to disrupt it loudly. The air seems to swirl around them like a river current swirling around a rusty underwater engine. They pull all my focus, whereas before I was playfully, peacefully unfocused.
The hospital walls, too, seem to be warmed by the red flowers. These tulips should be caged like savage beasts; their petals seem to widen like the jaws of some big African wildcat. I feel my heart beating—expanding and closing like a bowl full of red flowers—because it loves my body so much. I taste my own tears, which are salty as the sea, and seem to come from a place as distant as my return to full health.
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“Tulips” Themes
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Health and Life vs. Sickness and Death
The speaker of "Tulips" is a hospital patient contemplating some get-well flowers she's received. Though she never reveals why she was hospitalized, she seems to be slowly recovering, almost in spite of herself. As she describes her enjoyment of the blank, quiet hospital setting, it becomes clear that part of her has resisted the journey back toward health and normal life. Part of her may even have wanted to deteriorate and die. Through the speaker's descriptions, the poem contrasts the peacefulness of sickness/death with the pain and commotion of normal, healthy life. Though the speaker seems to prefer the former at first, she grudgingly accepts the latter in the end. Life may be painful, the poem suggests, but the will to survive is strong.
The speaker presents sickness and death as blissfully simple and restful, a kind of welcome numbness. She marvels at how "pure" and "nun"-like she feels in the hospital, for example, suggesting that life outside the hospital is messy and impure. She also says that she “wanted to efface [her]self,” suggesting a wish to erase herself—to leave the complexities of her identity and the world behind. And she welcomes the "numbness" and "sleep" the nurses bring with their drug-filled "needles"—implying an attraction to the pain-free restfulness of death. Moreover, she praises the "peacefulness" of the hospital environment and imagines "the dead" blissfully accepting it like a holy "Communion tablet." Death, here, is a blessing, a release from the noise of life.
Indeed, the speaker suggests that regular life, by contrast, is often violent, unpredictable, and painful. The tulips the speaker has received strike her as unwelcome "explosions," disrupting her peace. Their vibrancy reminds her of life itself; their "loud" redness evokes pain and seems to "correspond[]" with the speaker’s own "wound." The speaker resents even having to perceive life through her senses: to "take everything in" rather than shut everything out.
Though journeying back toward health means leaving her peace and quiet behind, the speaker starts to do so in the end, suggesting how strong life's pull is despite the pain it brings. The speaker becomes keenly "aware of [her] heart," which seems to be its own kind of "bloom[ing]" bouquet. The way she perceives it as beating "out of sheer love of me" suggests that she's re-learning how to love her body and her life. She "taste[s]" salty water—that is, tears—which signal some combination of sadness, relief, and joy. That these tears "come[] from a country far away as health" suggest that health itself feels distant, but no longer completely out of reach.
Meanwhile, the fact that the tulips spur all this emotion and resemble “dangerous animals" indicates just how powerful these tastes or glimpses of life are. Ultimately, the speaker's heart just keeps beating no matter what; her body wants to live.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-63
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Solitude and Freedom vs. Attachment and Commitment
Throughout "Tulips," the speaker weighs the peace of solitude inside the hospital against the complexities of love and attachment outside. Part of her wants to stay in her current environment, where she's isolated and basically anonymous, without work to do or people to take care of. It's not that the speaker doesn't care about her outside relationships and commitments; instead, the poem acknowledges that such bonds can become a burden. To this speaker, it seems, they've become so burdensome that even a hospital stay feels like a healthy and restorative release from the needs of those around her.
To some degree, the speaker clearly relishes the solitude, freedom, and relative anonymity her hospital stay provides. She declares that "I am nobody" with a certain joy and pride, associating her anonymity with "peacefulness." She adds that she's "sick of baggage"—her past, her relationships, etc.—now that she's "lost [her]self." She's wary even of her closest bonds; for example, she sees the smiles of her "husband and child" in "the family photo" as bothersome "hooks" holding her back. Her insistence that "I didn't want any [get-well] flowers" suggests that, on some level, she hoped to reject the bonds of love and affection in general. This rejection felt like a powerful kind of liberation.
The tulips disturb her, then, in part because the gift reminds her that she isn't really alone and free; she has a life and obligations waiting for her outside the hospital. She complains that the flowers "weigh me down" like "sinkers round my neck"; they feel like the personal "baggage" she had the illusion of leaving behind. They disturb her "calm" and pull her "attention," which was "happy / Playing and resting without committing itself." In other words, they disrupt her Zen-like, zoned-out state—and represent the commitments she can't escape forever.
Though the ending points a path toward recovery, the poem never really resolves the speaker's ambivalence about solitude and attachment. Instead, the tulips "concentrate" that ambivalence into a powerful symbol of life. On the one hand, she comes to associate these red blooms with her "sheer love" of herself—that is, her renewed will to live, a commitment that opens the way toward others. On the other hand, the flowers continue to strike her as "dangerous." Compared with her radically simplified world inside the hospital, the world outside—the place the flowers come from and are inviting her back to—involves far more risks, complications, and obligations. And so, while they're undoubtedly intended as a get-well message, the tulips reflect her mixed feelings about getting well anytime soon!
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 3-7
- Lines 18-35
- Line 43
- Line 48
- Lines 55-63
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Tulips”
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Lines 1-4
The tulips are ...
... bed, these hands.Lines 1-4 introduce the poem's central image—"The tulips"—before shifting to a description of the speaker's setting and mental state.
In line 1, the speaker describes "the tulips" as "too excitable" for their "winter" surroundings. Right away, it's clear that this is a personification; tulips can't literally be excitable (high-strung) in the way humans can. As the poem goes on, it becomes clear that this description is also metaphorical: the red color of the tulips is as vivid and attention-grabbing as high emotion. (It's possible, too, that the speaker is projecting her own emotions onto the tulips.)
This abrupt opening line leaves out a great deal of context: what tulips is the speaker looking at? Where did they come from? Where is "here"?
The following lines start to offer partial answers to these questions. The speaker is in "bed," surrounded by "white walls" and other "white" objects, "lying by myself quietly" and savoring the "peacefulness" of her environment. By the end of the stanza, which refers to "nurses" and "surgeons," it's clear that this environment is a hospital where the speaker is a patient.
Presumably, then, the tulips are a bouquet of get-well flowers sent by someone the speaker knows. (The poem never does reveal who sent them, so they're not defined by a particular relationship; rather, their significance lies in reminding the speaker that she has relationships and a life outside the hospital walls.)
Mentioning the tulips before explaining the setting might seem backwards, but it has at least two effects:
- First, it signals to the reader that the speaker's thoughts are somewhat meandering and may not always arrive in a "logical" order.
- Second, it places strong narrative emphasis on the tulips, which won't reappear until line 29 but which will become the main focal point, as well as the key symbol, of "Tulips."
Finally, these opening lines establish the poem's form. It's written in free verse and broken into fairly long, prose-like lines. Though the lines don't rhyme or stick to a steady meter, they're grouped into consistent seven-line stanzas (called septets), suggesting that the speaker is trying to arrange her wandering thoughts in some kind of order. Parallel phrasing ("how white [...] how quiet, how snowed-in," "these white walls, this bed, these hands"), repetition of important words ("white," "quiet"/"quietly," "lying"/"lies"), and strong alliteration and assonance (e.g., "learning"/"lying"/"light lies") give these lines about "peacefulness" a steady, calming sound.
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Lines 5-7
I am nobody; ...
... body to surgeons.
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Lines 8-10
They have propped ...
... take everything in. -
Lines 11-14
The nurses pass ...
... many there are. -
Lines 15-17
My body is ...
... bring me sleep. -
Lines 18-21
Now I have ...
... little smiling hooks. -
Lines 22-24
I have let ...
... my loving associations. -
Lines 25-28
Scared and bare ...
... been so pure. -
Lines 29-31
I didn’t want ...
... idea how free—— -
Lines 32-35
The peacefulness is ...
... a Communion tablet. -
Lines 36-39
The tulips are ...
... wound, it corresponds. -
Lines 40-42
They are subtle: ...
... round my neck. -
Lines 43-48
Nobody watched me ...
... to efface myself. -
Lines 49-52
The vivid tulips ...
... a loud noise. -
Lines 53-56
Now the air ...
... without committing itself. -
Lines 57-61
The walls, also, ...
... love of me. -
Lines 62-63
The water I ...
... away as health.
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“Tulips” Symbols
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Tulips
Unsurprisingly, tulips are the central symbol in "Tulips"! Over the course of the poem, the tulips the speaker has received take on a wide range of associations and connotations. They're a get-well gift (the speaker's just gone through surgery), so they're supposed to symbolize health and recovery, as well as love from the person who sent them. But for the speaker, they come to represent the power, pain, and complications of life itself—something she has very mixed feelings about! As gifts from a friend or loved one, they also represent her relationships with other people—something she's equally ambivalent about.
Because the tulips are red as blood, the speaker associates them with both pain and vitality:
- For example, she links their "redness" with her "wound" (meaning her surgical scar) in line 39; to her, the one "corresponds" with the other.
- At the same time, "The vivid tulips eat my oxygen" (line 49); they're so dynamically alive that they seem to drain some of her own vitality. Yet they also "concentrate [her] attention" (line 55), disrupting her zoned-out, almost death-like state and pulling her back toward the demands of life.
- And in the final stanza, she links the tulips with her own heart, which she compares to a "bowl of red blooms" that feels "sheer love" for her body (line 61).
Thus, in the end, the flowers symbolize the same powerful life force that she feels inside her, despite her attraction to sickness and death.
Similarly, the tulips are a clear reminder of the speaker's attachments and responsibilities to other people, despite her love of solitude, anonymity, and freedom from responsibility. Though she claims that "I am nobody" (line 5), the get-well bouquet reminds her that she is, in fact, somebody: a living person with relationships to others. This element of the tulips' symbolism is clearest in the fifth stanza:
I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free [...]Though she may not have wanted them, she does receive flowers, which remind her that she's neither "utterly empty" (like the dead) nor completely "free." She still has important bonds with other people, which she'll have to renew and tend to once she leaves the hospital.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 1: “The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.”
- Lines 29-31: “I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted / To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. / How free it is, you have no idea how free——”
- Lines 36-61: “The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. / Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe / Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. / Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. / They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down, / Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color, / A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck. / Nobody watched me before, now I am watched. / The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me / Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins, / And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow / Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, / And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself. / The vivid tulips eat my oxygen. / Before they came the air was calm enough, / Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss. / Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise. / Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river / Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine. / They concentrate my attention, that was happy / Playing and resting without committing itself. / The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves. / The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals; / They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat, / And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes / Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.”
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“Tulips” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration is an important part of "Tulips," adding to the musicality and meaning of key passages. For example, repeating, liquid /l/ and /w/ sounds create a soothing music in lines 3-4, reinforcing the "peacefulness" the speaker is describing:
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.Later, line 21 bristles with /s/ alliteration (also known as sibilance) and /k/ consonance:
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
The combination of hissing sibilance and hard /k/ sounds turns this ordinary image of a "family photo" into something ominous and unpleasant. These consonants also slow down the poem's pace, as if digging "little [...] hooks" into the rhythm of the language.
A similar effect occurs in lines 53-54, as the speaker describes air currents "snag[ging]" on the bright red tulips:
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.Here, sibilance and /r/ alliteration—along with other effects, such as /n/ consonance and the assonance of "sunken"/"rust"—slow the poem's rhythm considerably. Again, it's as if the language itself has hit a snag.
Alliteration is especially prominent at the very end of the poem, in lines 62-63:
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.Repeating /w/, /s/, and /k/ sounds help make the language musical and memorable, so that these last two lines function almost like a closing couplet.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 1: “tulips,” “too”
- Line 3: “learning,” “lying”
- Line 4: “light lies,” “white walls”
- Line 5: “nobody,” “nothing”
- Line 9: “white,” “will”
- Line 17: “bring,” “numbness,” “bright,” “needles,” “bring”
- Line 21: “smiles,” “skin,” “smiling”
- Line 25: “plastic-pillowed,” “trolley”
- Line 26: “teaset,” “bureaus,” “books”
- Line 27: “Sink,” “sight,” “water went”
- Line 28: “nun now,” “never”
- Line 33: “nothing,” “name”
- Line 40: “subtle,” “seem”
- Line 42: “red,” “round”
- Line 44: “tulips turn,” “window”
- Line 45: “Where once,” “widens”
- Line 50: “came,” “calm”
- Line 51: “Coming”
- Line 53: “snags,” “round,” “river”
- Line 54: “Snags,” “round,” “sunken,” “rust-red”
- Line 57: “walls,” “warming”
- Line 58: “behind bars”
- Line 61: “bowl,” “blooms”
- Line 62: “water,” “warm,” “salt,” “sea”
- Line 63: “comes,” “country”
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Assonance
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Personification
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Repetition
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Metaphor
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Simile
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Imagery
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Juxtaposition
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Asyndeton
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“Tulips” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Excitable
- Snowed-in
- Anesthetist
- Sheet-cuff
- Gulls
- Overnight case
- Pillbox
- Cargo boat
- Swabbed
- Trolley
- Teaset
- Bureaus
- Trinkets
- Communion tablet
- Swaddlings
- Corresponds
- Sinkers
- Cut-paper shadow
- Efface
- Eddies
- Committing
- Great African cat
Excitable-
(Location in poem: Line 1: “The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.”)
Easily excited or stimulated. Here used metaphorically (or as part of a personification) to describe the tulips' vibrant appearance.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Tulips”
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Form
"Tulips" consists of nine septets, or seven-line stanzas. It's a free verse poem, so it doesn't have a regular meter or rhyme scheme. In fact, its rhythm tends to sound prose-like, despite the presence of line breaks.
Each stanza is also end-stopped with a period, making each seem like a self-contained unit. Sometimes there are logical connections between stanzas, as when "They" at the start of stanza 2 refers to the "nurses," "anesthetist," and "surgeons" from stanza 1. But sometimes the stanzas—or even the individual sentences—are pieced together through a collage-like technique, without logical transitions between them. (This technique is known as parataxis.) For example, stanzas 4-7 ("I have let things slip [...] The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.") could be rearranged without changing the poem's meaning.
This makes the speaker's thoughts seem relatively spontaneous and undirected. Just as her "attention [...] was happy / Playing and resting without committing itself" before the arrival of the tulips (lines 55-56), her focus drifts and scatters in the poem itself—even if, sooner or later, it always returns to the tulips. At the same time, the end-stopping of stanzas and sentences, along with the consistent number of lines per stanza, may reflect the speaker's own effort to rein in her wandering focus.
Ultimately, the poem imposes both a thematic and formal logic on what would otherwise be a disjointed meditation, breaking it into equal-sized chunks anchored by the subject of "Tulips." It's as if the form itself helps the speaker make sense of her thoughts, at a time when she feels uneasily balanced between sickness and health, solitude and community, etc.
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Meter
As a free verse poem, "Tulips" has no regular meter. Its rhythm is fairly flat and prose-like, reflecting the psychological "flat[ness]" described in line 46. This is not a speaker who's prepared to shape her thoughts into elaborate, musical language. Instead, she records them in a dry, clinical, matter-of-fact way, more or less as they come to her—an approach well suited to her hospital environment and post-surgery fatigue.
Still, the poem isn't completely lacking in rhythm. Some lines sound pretty close to iambic pentameter, a classic meter in which there are five feet (metrical units) per line, each consisting of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable: da-DUM | da-DUM | da-DUM | da-DUM | da-DUM.
Many variations are possible within this pattern; for example, lines can contain an unstressed eleventh syllable. Listen to how this pattern shapes line 11:
The nur- | ses pass | and pass, | they are | no trouble,
Other lines that use or approximate iambic pentameter include line 31 ("How free | it is, | you have no | idea | how free——"), 42 ("A do- | zen red | lead sink- | ers round | my neck"), 49 ("The vi- | vid tu- | lips eat | my ox- | ygen"), and 63 ("And comes from a country far away as health"). Notice that several of these are the closing lines of their respective stanzas. Even though "Tulips" is meterless, then, it uses these moments as a kind of satisfying "home base" to return to now and then, or a subtle anchor for the speaker's drifting thoughts.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Tulips" is a free verse poem, so it has no rhyme scheme. Again, any kind of elaborate musicality would be at odds with the poem's tone and content. Line 10 ("Stupid pupil [...] everything in.") suggests that, like a passive eyeball, the speaker is just "tak[ing] everything in" as she lies in bed after surgery. Rather than navigating complex poetic forms, she seems intent on setting down her impressions as crisply and clinically as possible.
In reality, of course, the poem is artfully shaped in many ways, but it at least wants to appear simple and straightforward. In fact, its use of free verse seems related to the freedom praised in line 31: "How free it is, you have no idea how free." Just as the speaker values the visual and emotional simplicity of the hospital, she values formal simplicity in the poem she writes about it.
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“Tulips” Speaker
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The speaker of "Tulips" is a hospital patient recovering from an unnamed surgical procedure. She claims that she's "nobody" (line 5), or at least that she's "given [...] up" her name and history while hospitalized, but she also provides some clues about her life.
She is a "thirty-year-old" woman (line 22) who has a "husband and child" (her gender is never stated outright, but the poem was written in the UK long before legal same-sex marriage). She keeps a "family photo" of these two in her hospital room, although she's "sick of" the emotional "baggage" it represents (lines 18-21). This word, "sick," is especially interesting because she never reveals her actual ailment; it's almost as if the hospital stay is a remedy for her personal baggage! She's also received get-well flowers ("Tulips") from a friend or loved one.
In other words, as much as the speaker may be savoring her time alone—along with the illusion of freedom the hospital provides—she clearly has relationships and responsibilities beyond these walls. At its core, "Tulips" dramatizes the tension between her desire to remain sick, isolated, and free of obligations and her need to return to normal life. Statements like "I only wanted / To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty" (lines 29-30) and "I have wanted to efface myself" (line 48) suggest that she may even be wrestling with a desire to die. (Plath often grappled with suicidal thoughts in her poetry, and she tragically took her life two years after writing "Tulips.") By the end of the poem, though, she seems to feel a renewed "love" of her own body, and to anticipate a return to "health," distant as it may be (lines 60-63):
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.The circumstances of the poem map closely onto the poet's life: she wrote "Tulips" shortly after a hospital visit during which she had her appendix removed. It's fair to assume, then, that the speaker is either Plath or a lightly fictionalized version of Plath. In fact, Plath is famous for her autobiographical poetry, which was part of a broader 20th-century poetry movement called Confessionalism.
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“Tulips” Setting
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The setting of "Tulips" is a hospital where the speaker is recovering from surgery. The speaker describes her room and surroundings in some detail, in part because she's clearly content there. She feels "peacefulness" in this environment ("I am learning peacefulness," she says in line 3; "The peacefulness is so big it dazes you" in line 32)—so much so that she's reluctant to return to her normal life.
Here, she has a welcome feeling of giving up control, as she's cared for by hospital staff (including "nurses," an "anesthetist," and "surgeons," whom she mentions in lines 6-7). She feels as natural and passive as a "pebble" as she's tended by the nurses, who pass by like "[sea]gulls," perform manual tasks, and are too numerous to keep track of. She especially seems to welcome the "numbness" and "sleep" the nurses bring her in the form of drug injections (she says in line 17: "They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep."). Amid the blank, sterile "white[ness]" of this setting, she feels as "pure" as a "nun" in a convent.
Like a nun renouncing material things, she's traded her everyday possessions—"my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books" (line 26)—for the few personal effects she's permitted in the hospital, including a "patent leather overnight case" and "family photo" of her "husband and child" (lines 19-20). She also has a "name tag" and "a few trinkets" (line 33): small items provided by the hospital. At first she was "Scared" of this tradeoff and the danger it represented (line 25), but now she welcomes the loss of her everyday "baggage," which she claims to be "sick of" (line 18).
However, the "Tulips" of the title are disturbing her peace. As explained in the Symbols section of this guide, the flowers come to symbolize the painful, vibrant, complicated nature of life itself—namely, the life awaiting her outside the hospital. Their redness disturbs her "like a loud noise" (line 52), signaling that her blissful isolation is coming to an end.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Tulips”
Literary Context
"Tulips" was written in 1961, published in The New Yorker in 1962, and collected posthumously in Ariel (1965), after Sylvia Plath had died by suicide in 1963. By this final phase of her career, Plath was increasingly well-known, both for her own writing and as the wife of poet Ted Hughes, whose work had gained wide acclaim. (Her marriage to Hughes collapsed during the last year of her life, a personal shock that inspired some of her best-known writing.) She had published one previous collection, The Colossus and Other Poems, in 1960. Following her death, her poetry and fiction achieved worldwide renown.
"Tulips" is an example of Confessional poetry, a style that emerged in the U.S. during the 1950s.Confessional poets focused on deeply personal experiences, including private or even taboo subjects such as mental illness, sexuality, and suicide. Other well-known Confessional poets include Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton.
Plath wrote "Tulips" on March 18, 1961, shortly after undergoing an appendectomy that required a 10-day hospital visit. (Interestingly, she wrote another published poem, "In Plaster," on the same day.) The poem's descriptions and themes have echoes elsewhere in Ariel; for example, Plath's "Morning Song" also features a stark white hospital setting, while "Poppies in October" also features blood-red flowers as its central image. The "husband and child" mentioned in this poem almost certainly refer to Hughes and the couple's daughter Frieda, both of whom appear (unnamed) in other poems in the book. And while "Tulips" isn't as explicit about suicidal themes as a poem like "Lady Lazarus," its speaker quietly wrestles with a desire for oblivion. As one of the earliest poems in Ariel, "Tulips" seems to have been something of a breakthrough poem for Plath, a source of ideas she returned to in later pieces.
Plath really did receive tulips (from her friend Helga Huws) during her hospital stay. She explained the poem's origins in a letter to one of her mentors, the writer Olive Higgins Prouty:
["Tulips"] recalls to me the times when, after major surgery, I just floated thankfully, yet in clouded consciousness, reluctant to take up the business of full return to living—too weary yet to assume responsibility. Anything that compels one's return to that awaiting struggle is, at first, a rude intruder—be it a well-meaning friend or, as here, a vase of vibrantly red tulips.
Historical Context
From adolescence onward, Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) suffered from recurring bouts of suicidal depression. Mental health treatments during this era were often crude and ineffective, and some of the treatments Plath received worsened her suffering. Much of her most famous work, including her novel The Bell Jar, details her struggles with mental instability and the questionable medical practices of the time. While "Tulips" was inspired by a routine surgery, it draws on Plath's deep familiarity with hospitals and hints at a struggle between competing desires to live and die. (For example, the speaker's wish "To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty" in lines 29-30 suggests that she's tempted to give up on life.)
There's also a wider context to the speaker's distaste for the "baggage" of family relations, including her aversion to "My husband and child smiling out of the family photo." Plath had a famously complicated family life; the death of her father during her childhood left her grief-stricken, and her relationship to her mother was often contentious. All around her, as she grew up, she saw women giving up careers and personal freedoms to become housewives whose lives revolved around their homes and children. After World War II, this sacrifice was par for the course in American society; while some women were privileged enough to get an education, their male-dominated culture expected them to give up their careers and raise a family.
Since Plath had dreamed of being a writer from a young age, she had no intention of giving up her ambitions just to fulfill society's expectations. But as she got older and fell in love, she found herself desiring the very things that represented a lack of freedom to her: marriage and children. Some of Plath's more conflicted poems, including "Morning Song," express ambivalence about traditional motherhood, and many of her late poems, written after her separation from Hughes, seem to mock traditional marriage. This emotional complexity caused her work to resonate with second-wave feminists in the 1960s; women during this period saw their own experiences reflected in Plath's honest introspection.
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More “Tulips” Resources
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External Resources
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More About the Poet — A biography of Plath at the Poetry Foundation.
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The Poem in Plath's Own Voice — Listen to Sylvia Plath reading "Tulips."
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Plath, Silence, and Identity — A biographical article on Plath, including context about the appendectomy that inspired "Tulips."
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A Brief Guide to Confessionalism — An introduction to the poetic movement Plath is closely linked with.
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An Interview with Plath — Listen to an interview with the poet, recorded the same year as "Tulips" was published.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Sylvia Plath
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