Here are the first two stanza’s of “Tulips” by Sylvia Plath (from Ariel: The Restored Edition, A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement, Forward by Frieda Hughes (HarperCollins, 2004):

Tulips

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.
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 the surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

At the end of the sixth line we know for sure where we are, a hospital patient’s room, with white walls and a bouquet of bright (later we know, red) tulips. And there are places embedded within this place: before we know exactly where we are, there are a flower garden contrasted with a winter landscape, perhaps a bedroom, a battlefield (thus by analogy the patient might be someone wounded in battle), the operating room, the face, the hallway, the seashore (the threshold plage that is so important in Plath’s writing).

The first two places, tulip bed and snowscape, starkly contrast (and moreso when we see the tulips as red), with the second canceling the first in a way that makes the first even more vivid, reinforced by the contrast of battlefield-wounded and peacefulness to be learned. This contrast embodies the tension in the poem, as the patient-speaker, learning (perhaps) to be patient, becomes mere pupil, near-disembodied, thinking-poemspeaking, consciousness, whose thoughts communicate a profound ambivalence toward life, a struggle for dominance by the will to life and the will to death. The tulip-wound is the threshold between the two, that unites them. The tulips’ vividness of outer, physical life force is a wounding of the eye’s consciousness that wishes for death, reminding of the blood of inner physical life force, brought to the surface by a wound. The tulips invite and wish for cure (but there is no cure for the soul—Heracleitus and Hillman), making their claims of energy, and energizing awareness, activating the poetic/artistic mind. The perception of vivid life, as a reminder, a hook, hooking to life, causes excruciating mental-emotional pain to one who has been wounded by life, prefers death and is trying to learn its peacefulness.

Thus a manic-depressive hypersanity (I wonder what kind of hypersanity afflicted Dickinson).

Plath paints the place white, with a shout of red. She adds furniture, and the people who define the place—patient and nurses making their rounds. As the poem proceeds, Plath enhances the place with things that assert themselves, coming into focus and making their claims, or withdraw into drugged numbness, and the patient’s attention returns to the tulips, who (Plath does much personifying, while personalizing) increasingly dominate the place. Then enters a dangerous animal, embedding two contrasting places, Africa and zoo cage. Then a bowl of blood-love, the sea, love tasting like water “warm and salt”; and in the last line a place “far away”, from whence came the tulips and the love that sent them. And it all takes place as a room, a snowed-in room of a mind that Plath has credibly created in the reader's mind's eye.

At the end of the poem, it seems to me, the patient remains on the bed-threshold, alive but wounded and likely not to recover.

So for me there are two simultaneous attractions of Plath’s poetry: (1) her poetic brilliance, poetic consciousness of life, in poems that are vivid, energizing, enlivening; and (2) her insistence, like Malcolm’s, on speaking honestly—and her message is radical ambivalence toward life, eventually resolved by stopping poetry and literal life (while nourishing and shielding her children).

Comments?

Tom Koontz, Editor
Barnwood magazine
Barnwood Press