Tulips (poem)
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"Tulips" is one of American Poet Sylvia Plath’s better known poems. The dark themes adhere to what is regarded as Plath's style. Plath shares with readers through metaphor and diction her profound emotional stress.[citation needed] The poem may target wives and mothers, as it pertains to the specific emotional stress that these individuals may face in daily life.[citation needed] Perhaps the most predominant image in the poem, Plath equates her duties as a woman of her time as both tiresome and challenging.
The poem was included in the collection Ariel published in 1965.
Metaphors of colors
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In the poem, the speaker finds herself moving towards the freedom and purity that lies in death, symbolized by the hospital’s whiteness; however, the vivid redness of the tulips, which represents the living, colorful world, forcefully pulls her back to the painful reality.
These symbolic uses of colors, explore the speaker’s ultimate desire to be free from a life filled with the bondage of her loved ones and her profound responsibility as a wife and a mother.
In the poem, whiteness represents freedom and tranquility to the speaker. While the speaker is lying on the hospital bed, she is "learning peacefulness" in her silent freedom. The whiteness of the hospital room’s walls, of the nurses’ caps, and of the pillow on which she rests creates a world of serenity and stillness that separates her mind and physical body from her miserable reality. As a result, she feels herself detaching from her social and moral duties. In the speaker’s mind, the whiteness around her is so pure that she feels like “nobody” in it. She wants to "[have] nothing to do with” her husband and child and their hurtful “little smiling hooks." She yearns to reach for the liberation from life and to fall into the eternal peacefulness. Through the admiration and experience of the whiteness, the speaker expresses her intent to die.
As the whiteness stands for the liberation that the speaker seeks, the redness of tulips acts as the reminder of her burden and responsibility in the world outside the hospital room. The speaker sees the tulips' redness as a source of danger because "it hurts [her]" and threatens her liberation. She feels it like "red lead sinkers round [her] neck." Its appearance has woken her from her numbness and brought her back to the painful reality that she is not ready to confront. It speaks to her "wound" and "upsets" her mind with its lively color. The vivacity of the tulips’ redness ruins her peacefulness. That redness is vigorously opposed to the whiteness of hospital room; it corresponds with life and raw consciousness that exist in stark contrast to the speaker’s fantasy of perpetual peace. Consequently, by denying the presence of the vibrant redness of the tulips, the speaker simply denies her current vitality and yearns for the ultimate freedom, which is death.
Social relevance
In recent years, "Tulips" has often been associated with the Contemporary Trends of Feminist Criticism.[citation needed]