“Tulips”
The poem “Tulips” written by Sylvia Plath is a poem that uses extremely vivid language and detail. The poem is called “Tulips”, although tulips play a minor role in the poem. This poem is more about the observation of tulips then it is about actual tulips. At one point it almost feels as if she is jealous of the “Tulips”. She writes in the first person and has a very original structure. The poem is a easy read but intriguing at the same time.
This poem is about a person whom might have been injured in a battle of some kind or a war. The setting is a hospital. Plath leaves many details to the imagination but the setting is concrete. This poem is written in the first person. I believe Plath might take on an alternate identity in order to write this poem. The speaker in this poem seems to be depressed. Depressed about her life, her family, and her situation in this hospital. Visible from “ the green plastic–pillowed trolley” that she lays on are, red tulips.
Plath writes in seven line stanzas. She uses a unique rhyme scheme that changes from in each stanza. Occasionally she isolates one line in order to annunciate its meaning. She also uses enjambment to help stress the meaning of certain lines. Plath also like to use metaphor and simile in her poem. Lines nine and ten she uses simile when she writes, “Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in”. She is stationary in her bed and almost doesn’t want to see everything anymore but she cannot hide what is going on around her.
The Tulips in this poem play a unique role. It is as if she is jealous of the tulips. She makes the reader understand that the tulips are so red that they automatically draw attention. Earlier in the poem she speaks of how no one notices her. She compared herself to a “pebble” and speaks of how the nurses tend over her. Not that she is being neglected but that she is part of there routine. It is as if they have to tend to her not as if they want to. She is bothered that everyday no one notices her except for today when the tulips are present.
In the poem pride, Dahlia Ravikovitch uses many poetic devices. She uses an analogy for the poem as a whole, and a few metaphors inside it, such as, “the rock has an open wound.” Ravikovitch also uses personification multiple times, for example: “Years pass over them as they wait.” and, “the seaweed whips around, the sea bursts forth and rolls back--” Ravikovitch also uses inclusive language such as when she says: “I’m telling you,” and “I told you.” She uses these phrases to make the reader feel apart of the poem, and to draw the reader in. She also uses repetition, for example, repetition of the word years.
The first two stanzas, lines 1-10, tell the readers that Plath, for thirty years, has been afraid of her father, so scared that she dares not to “breathe or Achoo.” She has been living in fear, although she announces that he’s already dead. It is obvious that she believes that her father continues to control her life from the grave. She says that she “has had to kill” him, but he’s already dead, indicating her initial promise to forget him. She calls him a “bag full of God,” telling us that she considers her father a very strong, omnipotent being, someone who is superior in her eyes.
A phenomenal writer’s work generates a powerful bond between their words and the reader. This is factual of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. It contains universal, timeless themes of depression and death that, in these dejected days, many people can relate to. Sylvia Plath was a confessional poet whose oppressive life led to her relatable story. She wrote many astonishing poems, such as “cut”, “Among the Narcissi”, and “A Birthday Present” that all chronicle and showcase her struggle for a release from the suppressed world she subsisted in, a world that many remain to live in today. Sylvia Plath’s poetry narrates both her distinct, individual story and yet universal tale of a woman who searches for a way out of her depressed state of mind.
‘Morning song, is a poem about the birth of her baby. Plath’s positive and negative feelings are expreresed in the following quotes. ‘Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue’ this is a positive expression, it shows that People "Ohhh" and "Ahhh" at the baby, ‘new statue’ represents a object that would get lots of attention. A negative expression is ‘In a drafty museum, your nakedness Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls’, this shows that the hospital is like a drafty old museum with many visitors.
The use of enjambments further emphasize the meaning of certain areas of the poem. Notice how Plath uses enjambments in this example;
As the tone changes the perspective of the reader changes as well. There is no clear way to determine whether the speaker is responding to her situation with the appropriate amount of madness or is actually going mad and escaping into her own mind. Plath’s poem shows how a woman 's happiness was defined by her relationship to a man, which is enough to infuriate or drive any woman insane. The speaker struggles to continue her very existence because of her lost love. It is true that the speaker is very emotional and feels things very deeply, but that is not enough to prove that she had lost her mind. By the end of the poem the speaker seems to realize that she is wasting her time waiting on a man. She would rather have a present love that is completely unfathomable than a real love that is not around. The repetition in this poem makes the reader believe this loss is actually causing the speaker to lose her mind, but through changing tones that mirror the emotions anyone would go through in a situation of loss like this the speaker’s response is completely
Chaos and drudgery are common themes throughout the poem, displayed in its form; it is nearly iambic pentameter, but not every line fits the required pattern. This is significant because the poem’s imperfect formulation is Owen making a statement about formality, the poem breaks the typical form to show that everything is not functioning satisfactorily. The poem’s stanza’s also begin short, but become longer, like the speaker’s torment and his comrades movement away from the open fire. The rhyming scheme of ABABCDCD is one constant throughout the poem, but it serves to reinforce the nature of the cadence as the soldiers tread on. The war seems to drag on longer and longer for the speaker, and represents the prolonged suffering and agony of the soldier’s death that is described as the speaker dwells on this and is torn apart emotionally and distorts his impressions of what he experiences.
The free verse poem begins with a narrative of a woman who recalls her mother’s passing, fusing emotion with color, “there was a woman who hit her head and ever after she could see the sharp wing of blues and greens radiating from the body of her sister, her mother, her friends.” (Clifton, lines 1-5). Clifton elucidates her perspective on those around her by inserting the vision of blue and green hues swirling around her, using naturistic colors to symbolize their animated and lively existences. As Clifton maneuvers through her perception of her surroundings, she also depicts the before and after of her mother’s passing. Specifically, the first stanzas illuminate the fragility and beauty of those she loved, ultimately opposing her later reference to her mother lying in her casket, “behind her sewn eyes there were hints of purple and crimson and gold” (Clifton, lines 15-16).
The context in which the poem is taking place is in England, isolated away from all her family and friends, during the 1950's where Plath was the victim of a male-orientated sexist society and her poetry a choreography of female wounds. Values portrayed through “Cut” are Plath’s life of hardships from separation, divorce and as a single mother and poet. Through the remarkable consistent images that all “flow” from her very ordinary “accident” it is evident that this poem showcases a history of bloodshed through war, death, injury and maiming in the Western world and Plath’s family history
Plath frequently relates and compares the blood and thrill of birth of poetry to childbirth: the child forces its way out in the world, screams for delivery, just as words will keep torturing the poet and will not leave her calm unless they gush forward and amalgamate in poems. The redness of blood also stands for the eruption of emotion and vigor, induced by a fire in which the poet burns and turns into ashes so as to be revived like Lady Lazarus into this new phoenix - the poems, the new form of existence.
She tries by viewing the tulip as something menacing, “The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals; /They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat” (58-9). The speaker displays the tulip as a great African cat, which can represent ferocity and wildness, persuading the audience to believe that they are unsafe and threatening. However, tulips can also represent freedom, and which is one of the themes present in the poem. Freedom is something that the woman once had before the tulip, she was free from her motherly and wife duties, but the tulip is a reminder of absent loved ones who had given her the gift. The woman still yearns for freedom, she wants to be empty in order to be peaceful, as she states while rejecting the flowers, “To lie with my hand turned up and be utterly empty. / How free it is, you have no idea how free ---- / The peacefulness is so big it dazes you” (30-2). The theme of isolation develops as the speaker seems to prefer having any human contact for long periods of time; however, the tulip interrupts the isolation by reminding her
Giles, Richard F. “Sylvia Plath.” Magill’s Critical Survey of Poetry. Ed. Frank N. Magill, b. 1875. Pasadena: Salem Press, 1992.
Overall, the imagery that Plath creates is framed by her diction and is used to convey her emotions toward all relationships and probably even her own marriage to Ted Hughes, who had rude, disorderly habits. Even the structure of the poem is strict in appearance as each stanza ends with a period and consists of exactly six lines. In addition, the persona of the poem is very detached and realistic, so much that it is hard to distinguish between her and Plath, herself. However, Plath insinuates that the woman actually wants love deep down, but finds the complexity and unpredictability of love to be frightening. As a result, she settles for solitude as a defense against her underlying fear.
The first thought that encroaches upon the woman's daydreams and darkens the atmosphere is that of a solemn "procession of the dead" to Palestine. Her interaction with the procession is interesting because it symbolizes the journey she is making in her mind and sets the tone for later religious questioning in the poem.
Firstly, the poem is made out of a series of quintet stanzas. The consistent structure itself could imply stability and therefore power, too. Also, Plath uses different forms of figurative language to explore the theme and to communicate with the reader the relationship she had with her father. She commonly uses metaphors: from the very beginning she compares him to a ‘black shoe…in which I have lived like a foot’. This shows that she feels confined like a foot does in a shoe.