Sylvia Plath, “Tulips”
Sylvia Plath
I wrote about “Tulips,” by Sylvia Plath, a month ago. But I never fully revised this letter and so, obviously, did not send it out. I think in part it was the impending Presidential election. The proper response to Donald Trump is not suicide. It was to vote him out of office, which thankfully we as American voters did, if only barely: 75 million voters to 70 million who wanted a continuation for Trump.
Suicide, self-destruction to avoid pain and tribulation, is no answer. So, had Donald Trump won and been re-elected, would I have sent this out? I do not know . . .
Tulips
Sylvia Plath
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 anaesthetist and my body to 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.
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage ——
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my tea-set, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.
I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free ——
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.
The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.
The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salty, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.
When I first started teaching, I taught Sylvia Plath’s poems every year. She was then, and is now, one of the great American poets. But as time passed, I taught her less and then not at all. Something was wrong, I thought, in teaching my college-age students of the seductive powers of suicide. Although I greatly admire many of her poems, the incandescent power of violence and self-hatred was too strong in them. They felt to me like recipes for self-destruction, and in what might be considered an act of self-censorship, I felt that I need not celebrate them for my students.
Self-destruction? Consider the hypnotic ending to her short poem “Ariel,” about riding in early morning on her horse, Ariel:
And I
Am the arrow,The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the redEye, the cauldron of morning.
Whew. Her two most famous poems are “Daddy,” about her rage at her dead father for abandoning her by dying, filled with hatred of men and with women’s dependence on them, a central text in women’s coming to an understanding of themselves as women; and “Lady Lazarus” in which she recounts her successive suicide attempts as efforts at self-control that were subjected to the male gaze of psychiatrists and ‘well-wishers.’ In both these poems Plath makes uncontrollable anger and suicide into heroic acts.
Yes, she taps deeply into the human psyche, and particularly the psyche of women. But there is something so unconstrained, so over-the-top, about these marvelous poems that I feared it would pull students in, and to their own detriment. So I gave up teaching Sylvia Plath.
Why, then, am I now sending you a poem by Sylvia Plath, “Tulips?” It is as full of death, of self-effacement, as anything she wrote. But in this poem, I feel, there is an artistic control reins in the passions a little bit; and this self-control helps us a readers master the deep (and destructive) truths that she reveals to us. A second thing which recommends this poem, as opposed to others which – I hasten to add – are just as great, is that it balances two forces. We might call them, following Freud, Eros and Thanatos, love and death. Or the desire for death and endings as opposed to a force of life that says, “Live, live!”
“Tulips” has nine stanzas of seven lines. Although there are a few rhymes at the end of lines, it is largely unrhymed. Yet the poem teems with internal rhyme and repetition; alliteration pounds away as we read the poem, silently or out loud. I thought to highlight those rhymes, those repetitions, that alliteration, but I shall not. If you are interested, and you should be, you can hear what a remarkable poem this is on the auditory level, in the music and insistent rhythms of its words, by reading the poem aloud..
I propose to look at each stanza. But first, the situation of the poem. Plath is in a hospital room, lying in a hospital bed. (In the interest of historical specificity, we know that she was hospitalized for an appendectomy.) Someone has brought her flowers, a huge bouquet of red tulips. That’s it, that’s the entire poem. The patient in the white bed, and the red tulips.
And the whole poem, that opposition between the red flowers and the patient in bed, is given in the first stanza. In some sense, the poem states at its opening what it is about, and then revisits it in greater detail. Stanzas two through five expand on Sylvia Plath in that hospital bed; stanzas six through nine examine what those red tulips do to the room, to the patient, to the desires of Plath as she lies, cared for and tended-to, in that hospital bed.
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 anaesthetist and my body to surgeons.
If we can understand the first stanza, and its imagery, we can understand the first half of the poem. The hospital room is ‘winter’ because it is white: the walls, the sheets, underscore the absence of that scurrying-about we call life. Plath tells us this in the next line, which reveals – ah, how in retreat from life she is! – that in the hospital bed all is ‘quiet,’ ‘peaceful.’ She has surrendered her self – “I am nobody.” Those explosions are, of course, the ‘excitable’ red tulips amidst this pristine and quiet white, but she will focus on them only after half the poem has passed, the half in which she investigates just how wonderful it is to be nobody, to give everything up, all agency and identity: “I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses/And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to the surgeons.”
Ah, the wonders of quiet, passivity, lack of agency: She has no name, she is nobody, she is far – far – from the life of passions. She is fully out of that world of events and troubles and emotions that E. M. Forster in Howard’s End so clearly called the world of “telegrams and anger.” It is greatly peaceful here, where she is under the control of her doctors: She is at a total remove from her difficult marriage (the poem only acknowledges her marriage in a brief mention in stanza three) and her child (likewise, mentioned directly only in that third stanza). The violent tides of her angers and hatreds and dependencies and loves are all in abeyance as she lies in the white bed and is assisted by others.
There is a hypnotic attraction in these lines. Oh, to be in a white bed, comfort ed by the absence of most sensation, a quiet room, everything peaceful. That “snowed-in” refers to the whiteness of the hospital room, and also to the muffled covering (snow) that also attends her as she lies, divorced from the cares of everyday life, in the hospital bed. “Peacefulness.” “By myself.”
Of course, “I am nobody.” Entering the hospital, she gave her name to the reception desk, gave her clothes to the nurses (she is wearing, I think, a hospital gown). Doctors have come and asked for her entire medical history. Every thing has been taken from her, every thing that would connect her to her past and present life: She is lying in a hospital bed, passive, tended-to.
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.
Just as with the opening of the poem, something ‘more’ is suggested in the first line of this second stanza: Totally passive, she still sees. She is an “eye…that will not shut.” Of course, we already know that what she will ultimately see is not just the whiteness of the room and sheets, but the red tulips. But the poet/speaker will not return to the flowers until stanza six.
Here, she is a “stupid pupil.” A pun of course, on the pupil of the eye, which in this case is her face “between the pillow and the sheet-cuff,” the face (ah, later in the poem, prodded by the tulips, she will say – extraordinary phrase – that “I have wanted to efface myself”) between those “two white lids.” Yet she is also a stupid student – the other meaning of “pupil,” for she will not recognize how large are the forces calling her back from an embrace of that nothingness which is death.
Plath the speaker surrenders to the nothingness which is offered. She is in a state of total passivity as the nurses tend to her: she no longer has to care for herself. Note, please, the astonishing use of “pass” four times in the space of two lines, as the repetition of the word mimics the recurrent care which strips her from any responsibility for her own self.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps
It is all, in its recurrence of nurses passing by and tending to her, “doing things with their hands,” an emblem of the ‘nothingness’ to which she is surrendering. “One the same as another,/ So it is impossible to tell how many there are.” The nurses are indistinguishable, for the discrete, identifiable world has faded as she lies beneath the white sheets and is tended to. They are almost natural, in their white caps that make them look like seagulls. She herself is a passive eye, visibly represented by her “head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff/
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. This eye is all-seeing but totally passive, taking everything in yet wholly non- acting.
Let me comment here that part of what makes the poem so powerful is its use of metaphorical imagery. Here, the “stupid pupil,” and then later the “bright needles” and the “little smiling hooks,” the boat, being a nun, the astonishing “communion tablet,” the “red lead sinkers,” the silhouette (“a cut paper shadow”), the “great cat,” the salt of tears. We are given, through metaphor, images for the inner life of the poet lying in that hospital bed. This is neither straight emotional revelation nor explanation: the poet transforms her feelings into things we can see or recognize, things we know from our own experience.
To resume: An image of the natural world initiates the third stanza, where Plath indicates that while lying in the white bed she feels small and insignificant, as a pebble in a stream does when water runs over it incessantly.
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage ——
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
It is not just recurrence, though, but chemicals. The hospital brings her a cessation of feeling through not just because of the surrounding whiteness and the ongoing care, but through the shot which is administered to put her to sleep. It comes in “bright needles,” the adjective indicating both the stainless steel, light-reflecting needle itself, and the promise of peacefulness the needle promises.
Ah, she “lost myself.” Though not entirely, for the poem suggests forces of life are laid against the tempting forgetfulness, the nothingness, of death. I myself like using the Freudian terms, Eros and Thanatos, because Freud postulated these were the two opposing forces in each person’s deep well of desires, one which impels human beings toward each other (Eros), and the other which impels us toward an end (death, Thanatos) to the seemingly endless suffering which accompanies every human existence since we are cast into a world which always – always – ends in loss. Even as the speaker sinks into sleep, into “numbness,” sick of the “baggage” of the daily world – “Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage” – she understands what that baggage is. The baggage is quite literally her overnight case, since the hospital visit will end and she will go home to her “husband and child.” There is always that residue of life in ‘reality,’ in the everyday world. Though she only desires escape, daily realities have their claims on her, and will not let her go. Life and love have “hooks.” She says of the smiles of her family in the photograph she has taken to the hospital, “their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.”
I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my tea-set, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.
Stanza succeeds stanza, lauding the attractions of numbness, of not-feeling, of embracing nothingness, of Thanatos. She is thirty, and even if in stanza one she gave up her name to the receptionist, she still clings to her identity, “Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.” But the hospital dominates, here, and she is swabbed – not just with the alcohol which will clean where the surgical incision is to be, but “swabbed clear of my loving associations.” More than a hint of rhyme accompanies her fear of the loss of consciousness she will shortly experience, for she is anesthetized, “scared and bare on the green-pillowed trolley.” Daily life is in retreat, tea-sets and linen and books, as we come upon truly astonishing lined, one that would not surprise us if we encountered them in a Buddhist text acknowledging separation from a world of things, a world of suffering and death. Here there is the astonishing recognition that the hospital has immense attractions. Thanatos is, at this moment, religious. “The water went over my head./ I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.”
Yes, the ship which opened the stanza – a metaphorical ‘thirty-year-old cargo boat” – has now sunk, under water, beneath consciousness. But what a line! That loss of consciousness is purity: She is a nun. She is where she has always longed to be, “pure,” uncontaminated by life or the “hooks” that attach her to worldly love and to others.
What follows are some if the best lines written in the twentieth century, beginning with that stanza’s last line:
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.
I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free ——
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.
I am not sure I can comment on these lines, they are so compelling, centered on a “peacefulness is so big it dazes you.” She just wants to be “utterly empty,” and hence “pure.” What freedom, she suggests, not to have concerns, relations, obligations, even sensations. To just embrace nothingness. To lie in a hospital bed and lose all connection to anything but the whiteness that cuts off whatever is in the world.
“It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them/ Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.” I cannot fully recount how much I stand in awe before these lines. Dazed by nothingness, emptiness, she is peaceful, free, and pure. All we have to do to gain this state is give up our selves: “It asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.” We recall, of course, that she began “learning peacefulness” when in the first stanza she entered the hospital and give up her name. And those trinkets? Probably, in the context of this poem, “my husband and child smiling out of the family photo.”
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
…..
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.
Whew. What compelling lines. Perhaps this is why I could not teach Sylvia Plath to undergraduates any longer?
But those damn tulips. They intrude on her hospital room, they shatter her sense of “peacefulness.”
The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
I should warn you. I don’t think the second half of this poem, about the tulips, is as strong as the opening stanzas. In this poem, life is set against death, Eros against Thanatos, but the claims of death seem, to this reader at least, more compelling. (Maybe this is why I could not teach Plath?)
That red of the tulips is in dramatic contrast to the white of the walls and the bed sheets and the pillow. When all is about repetition and silence in her hospital bed, Plath thinks she can hear the tulips “breathe.” Even though they themselves are swaddled in whiteness. This is post-surgery time. The anesthetic[HG1] has worn off, and the red tulip bouquet “corresponds” to her bright red surgical scar. Not that the tulips are shouting: “They seem to float,” but in actuality they weigh her down. Once again, she is in water (the pebble, remember, and the cargo boat. The petals of the tulips are tongues (each petal of a tulip is, quite recognizably, shaped like a tongue); the tongues tell her of life, but she – besotted with a peacefulness she longs for – experiences their message as heavy: “a dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.” They weigh her down, keep her under water: One thinks of the final line of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” where the speaker, who had wanted to escape human interaction, realizes there is no escape: “Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
The continual passage of nurses, the peacefulness of bright needles, is suddenly supplanted by red flowers. No longer is she the passively observing “pupil” of the second stanza, but someone who herself is watched.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
She notices how impoverished the room actually is, light coming and going gradually while she lies, without significant dimension or definition, “flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow.” A silhouette taken from life, but not living. Life forces, sun and flowers, surround her on either side – the sun watches, it has “an eye,” as do the tulips.” Oh, oh, oh. The call of surrendering the self to the overwhelming nothingness is great. She wanted so much to be without self, identity, life. By taking away her life’s desire – to not feel – these red flowers have left her helpless before a life force that course through all things.
One of the most powerful and magnetic lines in all her oeuvre follows, a powerful and majestic line, hypnotic, and deeply destructive: “I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.” Never has tautology been more tremendous: to efface oneself is not merely to disappear, but literally to wipe away one’s face.
Plath cannot efface herself, because life and love and the temporal world call out to her: “The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.” This is a strange line. One would think that without oxygen one would be dead. But she means the opposite: Her desire for freedom, peace, purity – which can be gained by closing one’s mouth on the communion tablet that is death – is extinguished by the call of life that emanates from the tulips and the sun. [The tulips breath “through their white swaddlings:” I should acknowledge here that the imagery seems to connect to another hospital stay, when she went in labor to have her baby. Which links, of course, to the family picture and its “hooks” that we encountered in the third stanza.]
Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.
There is in the penultimate stanza a summary of all we have seen heretofore: she embraced peacefulness, and now there is noise. The cargo boat is back, still sunk, but now troubling the water which “snags and eddies” around an engine that looks suspiciously like the tulips, “rust-red.”
The speaker of the poem who was content in her hospital bed, “lost;” now she finds the tulips “concentrate my attention” that formerly was uncommitted, playful, passive. Now her passivity is an enemy, it leaves her helpless before the tulips and the sunlight. [In rereading his, I thought of a footnote that might be appropriate, if a bit flashily literary. Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself” 27 speaks of his blood as a “red marauder.” “They have left me helpless to a red marauder,/ They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.” But he is talking about another form of Eros, as he is engaged in masturbation.] The world is calling Sylvia Plath back.
The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salty, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.
In these concluding lines the tulips ‘warm’ the “snowed in” white walls that she first thought would protect her from all she has left behind, not just family and love and responsibilities, but life itself. The tulips threaten to consume the peacefulness she had slipped into, and in that sense they are dangerous: “The tulips should behind bars like dangerous animals” and once again, filled with tongues, they are compared to a mouth: “They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat.” And as the mouth of the cat opens, to consume her passive slide into the cessation of all consciousness and feeling, she “is aware of my heart: it opens and closes/ Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.” The redness of tulips, the mouth of the great African cat, the diastole and systole of her heart (red, opening and closing its valves as it pumps the life-preserving blood through her body) come together: “Red blooms.” For Eros rules, compels her to keep living and to re-enter the world of the living. She had taken the temporary surcease of feeling that she encountered in the hospital for something she could close in on. And yet. Her heart beats.
These final lines are both difficult and not so difficult. She returns to the sea – remember that cargo boat, sunk? – and tastes the tears running down her cheeks. She is alive, and in the world; she has retreated form that temporary world of anesthetic forgetfulness and peacefulness. Yet she has an awareness, so strong has been the pull of Thanatos, that she is still distant from a “country” that is health. This final line is a self-diagnosis on the speaker’s part: She is a long way from being healthy. It is not being discharged from the hospital, getting past the appendectomy, that Plath she is addressing here. With great self-awareness she recognizes an unhealthiness to her obsession with peacefulness, quiet, slipping out of consciousness.
I wish I could say that Sylvia Plath heeded those final lines and recognized that Eros was connected to health. She succumbed, not too long after writing this poem, to her own suicidal impulses. The allure of not feeling, of not feeling pain, was too strong. Never, in my view, has that allure been set forth more compellingly than in this poem.
Yet I am sending this out to you in a time of pandemic. Why? To be fully truthful, I am not sure. I have already said that I think the first half of the poem, on the attractiveness of giving up on life and sinking into death, is the strongest part of “Tulips.” Nonetheless, in this poem Plath sees that life, love, Eros, has its call on us. It, the urge to live, is the country of “health.”
In this very great poem, we encounter contrasting and warring forces, life and death. I don’t think anyone has every presented the appeal of death, of losing consciousness forever, of sliding into nothingness, with more cogency than Plath. She holds nothing back. Death is lovely, what we wish for, what we desire.
Life does not want to let us go. It is poised against death, and we recognize its claim, for it calls to us. It is from the country of health.
Like the Sirens that Odysseus heard, the call of death, Thanatos, is strong and sweet. Do we need to hear that in a time of coronavirus, of great individual stress and massive collective destruction? I don’t know. But denying what we feel, what we know is out there, is not a solution to anything. (I wish Trump knew that.)
There is an ancient Talmudic saying: Choose life. Its roots are in the Bible, Deuteronomy 30:19: “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” In the poem “Tulips,” Sylvia Plath shows herself as aware of this great need. We, as we face illness and social distancing and often despair, much choose life as well. Tulips over surrender.
Eros and those tulips may not have been, finally, compelling for Sylvia Plath as she lived her life and chose her death. But I think that in this poem, she recognizes that we must choose life. Flowering over non-existence, family pictures over self-effacing. Even as we recognize, as Plath so powerfully did, the strong and seductive claims – enormous claims – of not existing, of ending feeling and suffering and tribulation, life calls us and we must embrace it. Even if Plath, finally, did not.