Read the full poem here at Poetry Foundation.

Tulips by Sylvia Plath has always been a special poem to me. It is detached yet cutting, capturing what it feels like to try and adapt to an existence that is so distorted, so different, that it might never be normal. Plath’s speaker’s attempts to embrace her unlucky situation by crafting a new reality for herself keeps getting interrupted a painful reminder— that whether she succeeds or fails, she remains deeply lonely either way.

Tulips meanders through a sick woman’s stream of consciousness, as she lays in a hospital bed trying to process her situation when someone gives her a bouquet of red tulips.

“I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly/ As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands./ I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions./ I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses./ And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons”. Ironically, she welcomes sickness, revelling in it. The speaker equates “learning peacefulness” to giving in to her sickness. She practices surrender— she mindfully notes what she sees: the walls, the bed, her hands. Instead of “my hands”, she writes, “these hands”— in disowning her hands and grouping them with the other objects in the room, she begins her dissociation from all that make up the mosaic of her identity. She follows this with also giving up her name, clothes and the rest of her body. She appears to label these as “explosions”, perhaps as they are loud, unwanted reminders of the person she was trying to be before her sickness took hold. “I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat/ stubbornly hanging on to my name and address”. There is tension here, between her bitterness of having been robbed of her life so young, and her attempt to welcome this new life. On the one hand, she dismissively labels basing an identity on surface things as a “cargo boat”; on the other hand, she points out her young age, and the way she “stubbornly” hung on to those markers of identity. Similarly, the smiles of her husband and child, two relationships presumably turned upside down by sickness, also invoke both pain and contempt: “Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks”.

“… the water went over my head./ I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.” She then begins to paint these losses with a religious wash. She imagines letting go as a sort of baptism— perhaps this is her way of writing a new narrative, another attempt to make bearable the excruciating. In extreme pain, we flounder for ways to make any of it palatable. It seems to work, as she marvels, “How free it is, you have no idea how free— and it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets./ It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them/ Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.”‘ Her language turns as graceful and light as her new state, before she gets interrupted by the arrival of the tulips.

Tulips symbolise spring, newness and hope, the complete opposite of the speaker’s experience, of the peaceful end she was trying to get to. They are a lively, bright sound in her otherwise white and quiet existence, reminding her of everything she will no longer have or become. She uses words like “red”, “gift”. “baby” and “float” to describe them, in contrast to the greyscale tones of death, sinking and loss she uses to write of her experience prior. The tulips add movement to the room, seeming almost to mock all the inert objects that simply sit there (including herself). They waltz with the light, turning in step with it: “The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me/ Where once a day the light slowly widens and thins”. They are full of light, drawing her back to the land of the living. They imply that someone loves her enough to give them to her and to wish her well.

The tulips achieve their purpose. Plath’s speaker allows, “And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes/ Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me”. She is reminded that she is still alive and that her heart still beats to keep her alive.

“The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,/ And comes from a country as far away as health.” Finally, she accepts her painful reality, that her experience is extremely lonely, marooning her far from health and its inhabitants. Here, the poem fittingly comes to its end. Perhaps in acceptance, she no longer needs to desperately spin narratives in order to fend away her pain. She finally achieves the quiet she hankers after.