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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

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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 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 red Eye, 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.
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