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¶ … 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...
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."
The agony of sickness is more than just the physical suffering for the speaker. The speaker also feels trapped by the illness. She is no longer free, because her body and its sickness trap her in the hospital. Yet when she is not thinking about the tulips, it seems as if the speaker feels a sense of peace in spite of her being bedridden. The tulips remind her of reality, of her life, and the blood that still flows in her veins.…
Sylvia Plath: A Brilliant but Tortured 20th Century American Poet One of America's best known twentieth century poets, Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) lived an artistically productive but tragic life, and committed suicide in 1963 while separated from her husband, the British poet Ted Hughes. Before her death at age 30, Sylvia Plath had suffered a bout of severe depression for several months, the likely result of her separation from Ted Hughes and
Sylvia Plath's Daddy Any attempt to interpret a work of literature by a writer as prolific, as pathological, as tormented and as talented as Sylvia Plath requires a good deal of caution. A lot of Path's work is biographical -- one might successfully argue that the vast majority of the work of virtually any author is biographical to a certain extent. For Plath, however, this association between art and life, poetry
There were also a few children's books by Sylvia Plath that there publish which include: "The Bed Book" (1976), "The It-Doesn't-Matter'Suit" (1996), "Collected Children's Stories" (2001), and "Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen" (2001). In conclusion, Sylvia Plath is a great American poet, short story writer, novelist, and essayist that provided the world with many great poems, short stories, prose and essays. For most of her short life, she suffered from clinical depression,
Ultimately, Lady Lazarus uses her status as a failed suicide as a source of power, not disempowerment. The haunting words of the end of the tale that she is a woman who eats men like air are meant to underline the fact that despite the fact that the doctors feel that they are the source of her coming to life again and again, there is a strength of spirit within
The reader must search for the theme of the poem, and only from learning about Plath's own life can ascertain that the subject. Plath's esoteric references are less accessible than Lincoln's musings about suicide, death, and hell. However, both Plath and Lincoln do directly mention death in their poems. Lincoln's narrator mentions in line two of "Suicide's Soliloquy" his "carcass" and then in line three, the "buzzards" that "pick
The poem "Daddy" thus chronicles a personal misery that is shared by all of Europe, bleeding its collective wounds of guilt at the end of World War II. This sense of the personal and the impersonal becoming melded into poetry is what gives "Daddy" its power. Everyone, not just everyone with a personal, historical family connection to the Holocaust can understand the speaker. She is everywoman, and perhaps everyone who