‘Tulips’ by Sylvia Plath is a personal and confessional poem. It explores the poet’s innermost emotions and mental state.
After being hospitalised for an appendectomy, Plath wrote this poem about a bouquet of tulips that Ted Hughes had gifted her. Hughes himself noted that this poem was the first that she wrote “at top speed, as one might write an urgent letter. From then on, all her poems were written this way.” The poem balances the ease of death with the tulips voracious desire for life. Plath hates the tulips, ‘vivid tulips eat my oxygen’, not wanting to acknowledge reasons to live. Tulips marks a change in Plath’s writing, setting her on a course of destruction. The poem delicately balances ideas of life and death, ruminating on Plath’s own state of mind.
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.