“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.
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.
Sylvia Plath, a great American author, focuses mostly on actual experiences. Plath’s poetry displays feelings and emotions. Plath had the ability to transform everyday happenings into poems or diary entries. Plath had a passion for poetry and her work was valued. She was inspired by novelists and her own skills. Her poetry was also very important to readers and critics. Sylvia Plath’s work shows change throughout her lifetime, relates to feelings and emotions, and focuses on day to day experiences.
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.
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
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
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.
A variety of language devices are employed to create tone for the poem. Sounds such as assonance is used in the line “a flap like a hat” with an emphasis on ‘t’ and taken off on ‘a’ coupled with dental ‘t’ and plosive ‘p’ evoking and mirroring the on/off nature of a hat, in reference to the skin that has been cut on her thumb. Internal assonance and consonance appear and disappear with unpredictability. This demonstrates signs of Plath’s mental illness. Also there is assonance in “little pilgrim, the Indian’s axed your scalp” where the chopping sounds evoke the movement.
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.
"Sylvia Plath poem written two weeks before she died reveals 'disturbed' state of mind." The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 30 Apr. 2013. Web. 1 June 2014.
Often times we look through people and not truly at them. Sylvia Plath was one person who was looked through a lot when she desperately wanted to be noticed. As a striving poet and author in a time period where women were not expected to perform such tasks Sylvia struggled to keep it all together. Although she had her high points, like we all do, it remains apparent that she was battling with a deep inner conflict. Sylvia brings her emotional burden to life in her first novel The Bell Jar. Feminism, communism and a suicide attempt are all intertwined in this biography. The life of a not only a tortured poet but a struggling mother is obvious throughout her work. In order to grasp the lasting impression of Sylvia Plath, we have to understand where she comes from, how the critics and the people of her time viewed her, and the impact she left for the rest us.
Plath employs a shift to accentuate a change in time. The speaker of the poem says “I am silver and exact/Now I am a lake” (1, 10) to indicate an alteration in time. The purpose of the device is to convey an adjustment in c...
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.
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.
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.
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.