The appendectomy followed a miscarriage that Plath had suffered through, so given those realities in the poet's life -- especially for a woman to lose a child she had been carrying -- one can identify with the bleak nature of the poem. Confronted with the birth that turned out to be death, and then a painful appendectomy, the tulips are used as something of an abstraction and the redness of them gives her pain because it "corresponds" to the wound in her body from the surgery.
The opening stanza's first few lines seem rather peaceful and restful: "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…" but by the fourth line in the first stanza, the reader is hit with the truth about this poem, which is that the poet feels like the life has gone out of her and she has turned her clothes "up to the nurses" and her "body to surgeons"; those knife-wielding physicians and the environment she is in let the reader know this poem is going to be very personal and perhaps very depressing.
Anyone who has been in a hospital for any length of time can identify with the lines that compares nurses to birds: "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." Ocean environments are always places where ubiquitous seagulls sway in the wind and scurry along the sand, and they all look alike, and they are all free.
Meanwhile the tulips "eat my oxygen," the poet writes. She would like to get rid of them the same way she would like to depart from the "trappings of her life and the family she has"
(Dobbs, 1977). Instead of tulips the inference from the poet is that she would prefer death:
"Now I have lost myself / I am sick of baggage / My husband and child smiling out of the family photo / their smiles catch onto my skin / little smiling hooks."
Smiles and hooks don't normally blend together very well; except when a young boy catches a catfish and smiles at his achievement on a summer day with a worm on his hook, a woman in a hospital who has been given flowers to cheer her up doesn't imagine smiling hooks. In fact the tulips have ruined her day. She prefers to be depressed and dark to happy and bright: "The tulips are too red in the first place / they hurt me & #8230; their redness talks to my wound / it corresponds / they are subtle / they seem to float / though they weigh me down."
Margaret Dickie explains that Tulips is certainly not cheerful, but it moves from "cold to warmth, from numbness to love, from empty whiteness to vivid redness," and this is done through "associative imagination" (Dickie, 1979). What Dickie is alluding to is the last stanza of the poem, in which Plath admits that despite the negative images and thoughts of the preceding stanzas of the poem, the walls "…seem to be warming themselves" and like the tulips, the poets' heart opens and closes and there is a sense that the tulips have bloomed "…out of sheer love for me." A woman in such desperate straits needs love, and the last two lines take Plath away to the sea, a peaceful thought, albeit her health is not what it should be.
Is this poem designed to be a criticism of the hospital environment? No, although it certainly comes out that way in passages. The problem is health, and the heart is numbed and made bitter -- in contrast to the cheery red tulips -- and the heart wants a chance to experience that darkness without being intruded upon by all the trappings of the hospital and its nurses, who are too many to count.
Critic Barbara Hardy believes that the poet gradually accepts the tulips, a process which symbolizes the poet (and patient) as being able to reluctantly accept a return to life. "The flowers really do move toward the light…do take up oxygen… [and are] inhabitants of the bizarre world of private irrational fantasy"
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