The Use of Color in Sylvia Plath's "Tulips"

Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds." This is one of the lines in the poem "Tulips" by Sylvia Plath. Whenever one is analyzing poetry (or any work of art for that matter) it is important to avoid two things: 1) to not become too pedantic in one's approach and 2) continually rely on the artist's biography to fill in details. In the case of Plath, too often critics will rehash the same fodder when it comes to understanding her poetry: that she was depressed, lonely, suicidal, etc. While these factors certainly do work their way into her art, they are not the reasons for why her art succeeds in the ways that it does.

In "Tulips" the speaker is regarded indifferently, both by others as well as herself. She is in a white hospital room, with white walls and white sheets. She admits she is "nobody" and "has nothing to do with explosions." Overall her tone is one of numbness and peace, and her body nothing but a "pebble" and that the nurses "tend it as water."

Though admitting she has lost herself, the speaker literally speaks about being "sick of baggage" (both literal and emotional in this case) and enjoys being anonymous, without identity, and almost floating ethereally towards peace, till she notices the images of her family photo and how their "little smiling hooks" latch onto her and pull her back.

The tulips, presumably brought to her as a gift, reside in their redness upon the shelf, "corresponding" to her wound. The redness is used in contrast to the numbing white, for they are, in their vivid crimson, plashes of life. The speaker notes that she can hear their breathing, almost as though the color themselves is coming alive within the murmur of her mind.

Although readers are not told exactly why the woman is in the hospital bed, we get a sense of her physical wound; that it is blooming with blood that corresponds to that of the tulips' redness. The speaker has set it up so that she feels the pull of the tulips: they are the redness reminding her of life, though instead of the standard "celebration" such realization would cause from most other poets, the speaker in this poem feels the tulips behaving as "A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck."

While the tulips do impose themselves thematically, the speaker now believes they are watching her; where as earlier in the poem she was "nobody" and felt as though no one regarded her identity. She could have disappeared and it would not have mattered. The tulips' sharp, contrasting color against the whiteness of what surrounds her seems to be taking over, in the speaker's mind. The speaker thinks she could be swallowed up by them (she compares them to another red image: "the mouth of some great African cat") and then notices the beating of her own red heart, thus presuming that it is her own red heart the tulips will try to swallow.

"Tulips" is a great poem, one that reveals a master technician and one that rewards upon rereading. While the vivid redness of the tulips represents life, and the whiteness of her surrounds a non-life, it is through these metaphors that Plath can distill the drama her speaker faces so effectively.