Analysis of Sylvia Plath's "Ariel": themes and interpretations in Tulips

¶ … Sylvia Plath's poem "Tulips," the speaker is a sick woman in bed in hospital. She weaves in and out of a drug-induced sleep, and much of the poem reads like a hallucinogenic stupor. The reader perceives the hospital room through the speaker's eyes, which focus especially on the colors white and red. White represents the peace and calm of snow, winter, nurse's caps, and purity. The red of the tulips symbolize tension, anxiety, interference, and possibly also death. Although the speaker does not die at the end of the poem, the theme of "Tulips" is the fine line between life and death and the centrality of health to personal identity.

The speaker straddles the fine line between life and death throughout the poem. She uses the word "slip" to show that she slips in and out of consciousness. The reader never learns exactly why the speaker is in the hospital, only that she has been there long enough to have her clothes in a bag and a photo of her husband and child with her. Living in a dream state, the speaker contemplates the depth of her solitude and even questions her own identity. "I am nobody," she states in the opening stanza.

Moreover, it is clear that the patient has either a chronic illness or has undergone a serious surgery because she is receiving something like morphine through a needle. The drug is what brings her the "numbness in their bright needles," and the peace she needs to be able to sleep and feel calm. Without the drug, the speaker would feel the onslaught of pain and suffering that the color red represents. Life is symbolized by the color white; red symbolizes death. This is ironic, given that the motif of winter and snow are more commonly associated with death than are red flowers, which typically symbolize life, birth, spring, and renewal. In the speaker's case, she has flipped the two realities and shifted the pole of life and death. In her world, white represents life and red represents death.

The red tulips that consume her consciousness start to irk the speaker as she realizes how frustrating it is to have no control over her body. The tulips "hurt me," she states, even though they are just flowers. They also "weigh me down…a dozen red lead sinkers around my neck." It is possible that the tulips also symbolize her illness because of the fact that people have brought her flowers as a sign of sympathy. Only sick people in hospitals receive flowers, she is thinking, not healthy people. Thus, "Before they came the air was calm enough," but now she feels inundated by the flowers and the death they represent. "The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea / And comes from a country as far away as health."