'Tulips' by Sylvia Plath

I’ve been reading quite a lot of Plath recently: a sentence everybody should be capable of saying with honesty all the time. Specifically, the earlyish Journals (slowly and with much unfolding pleasure) and Ariel. I’ve read most of Ariel before but not for some time, and there are plenty of poems of which I find I hadn’t carried much from then to here and now — to this current embarkation. But forgetting is a welcome slippage if it allows us to discover as if anew.¹

My current favourite is ‘Tulips’. It’s a relatively long poem that does you the favour of being clear and even straightforward at first blush and then flatters you by giving out so much more at every return. It is as inexhaustible as it is sodden with utter exhaustion. I’m not going to attempt any kind of comprehensive reading (not that I've ever managed to do that of anything) because it would take forever; all I’ll do here really is appreciate it: for poetry isn’t going to appreciate itself.

Partly what excuses me from being thorough is that others have come before me: ‘Tulips’ is probably better known than ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’, another of Plath’s poems which I wrote about fairly recently. There is a blog whose title is taken directly from this poem, and whose author has done an excellent overview already. An excerpt:

The white that seeps through the poem, the narrator seeming almost ‘snowed-in’ not only in the hospital (physically unable to leave due to her illness and the weather) but also in her own dreamlike perception of reality, suggests that the narrator is trying to escape from herself. She seems to want to rid herself of identity (‘I am nobody’) and leave behind the burden of family life.

This is very good: long-leashed but nicely poised, never breaking away from the poem and careful to keep referring back to it, unafraid of profundity and yet cautious of overstating it. That this was written by an A-Level student (in 2014, I think) is damn impressive, although that shouldn’t distract from the quality per se.

‘Tulips’ has an ambiguity halfway across its first line, just before its first caesura: viz., ‘excitable’. Ordinarily, it would mean something like ‘capable of, or liable to, being excited’ — but, in Plath’s usage, it seems to also mean ‘capable of causing excitement’. The speaker resents the tulips for making her excited, and for being themselves excited. Very subtly, then, the presumably vivid-in-colour tulips are introduced with an image that gives them a gaudy-giddy vitality, already a threat to the speaker’s desire for (or commitment to) whiteness, placidity, even death. They are out of place and out of season, an unwanted, unwarranted burst of spring in this ‘winter’ both worldly and personal. I use too many adjectives. 

The speaker’s ‘learning peacefulness’ presages the pun in ‘Stupid pupil’, a delicate oxymoron that equates stupidity with inveterate attentiveness while chastising the speaker for being almost too good a student of peacefulness. She is, paradoxically, such a good ‘[s]tupid pupil’ that she ‘has to take everything in’ when learning, even everything about peacefulness: she thereby contravenes her own goal of fading away and shutting out the world. If we assume, reasonably, a likeness (however rough) between Plath and her speaker, it seems also that the speaker compromises herself by being too good a poet, unable not to notice and assess the details of her surroundings. In considering its subject matter and expressed desires, the poem’s very existence is paradoxical, since, simply, it is not nothing. You cannot write nothing; you also cannot, as much as you might want to, ‘write upon nothing’.² A pen does not work on the air.

There is far too much in the poem to keep going on like this. I will, however, take a look at the phrase that is also now the title of the blog mentioned above: ‘I didn’t want any flowers’. It begins both the fifth stanza and the twenty-fifth line overall — is thus practically the dead centre of this forty-nine-line seven-stanza poem. Clearly, the speaker did not wish to play the patient’s part in the hospital custom of sending in flowers and arranging them by the bed, as though to domesticate and prettify the space under occupation by the sick. What’s not clear, however, is how and to whom the sentiment is addressed. It could be a purely internal thought, an angry, exasperated sigh over the presence of the flowers. Or it could be something she has said to the nurses or to the people responsible for the flowers: the implication being that she was clear she didn’t want flowers before the flowers arrived, or else that she wished she had made it clear (it is, possibly, but not necessarily, ‘[I said] I didn’t want any flowers’). To marry both possibilities, the phrase could still be an internal thought, one which she has wanted to direct to the nurses but which, for any number of reasons, she has been unable or afraid to say aloud.

Beyond their intrusive life and colour, the tulips are remindful of the outside world — where time still moves, even at the rate of the growth of flowers — and therefore of a piece with the admonitory smiles in the ‘family photo’ in lines 20–21, figured here as ‘little smiling hooks’ that would fish her out of the waters within which she wants to stay submerged, fling her on the quayside, and leave her gaping, gasping.

It's quite a poem.

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¹ The idea of forgetting having read something always puts me in mind of Red Dwarf: Holly, the ship's onboard computer, bemoans that he (I think this was Norman Lovett's portrayal, not that the actor's face's gender means anything for the computer) has read everything in existence, and requests that any knowledge of Agatha Christie be removed from his memory so that he can read the stories again without knowing the outcome. I also think of Peep Show: Mark: 'Jez, are you reading Mr Nice again?' Jez: 'Yes, it's a great book. Plus I'm usually incredibly high when I read it, which makes it better, but also I've forgotten most of it, so it's like I'm reading it for the first time.' That's not the exact quote.

I sometimes wish I could forget ever having Peep Show the last dozen times, just so I can watch it for the first time again. The same with the The Simpsons: I would give up everything if it meant I could see The Simpsons for the first time again.

² Italicisation sic. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, in A Tale of a Tub and Other Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 1–103, p. 102. This quotation from Swift is used by David Markson as the epigraph for his lovely book This Is Not a Novel, one of a series of not-novels built almost entirely out of anecdotes about culture, literature, history, and the arts. Interestingly, the quotation is formatted by Markson as though it were taken from a poem — and with identical line-breakings in more than one edition, suggesting to me that this isn’t to do with the spacing of the page — but A Tale of a Tub is prose. I don’t really have a conclusion to draw from this.