Question

Explanation stanza 1 tulips by Sylvia Plath

Answer 1

First Stanza

Note the first person present tense - the reader is directly involved with this hospital patient from the first stanza, and the 'relationship' deepens as the poem moves on. With a distinct echo of Emily Dickinson the fifth line's 'I am nobody' sums up the speaker's feelings as they lay in bed, having given up all to the hospital staff.

There follows throughout the poem this idea that the speaker feels herself to be inanimate - a nobody, like an eye, or pebble, or cargo boat, or nun and finally a cut-paper shadow. And in contrast, the tulips have arrived to re-animate life and return the speaker to the world of blood, flesh and tears.

Sylvia Plath's poetic life is one long battle between these two forces, the oblivion of death and the responsibility of life.

Tulips, though packed with imagery and symbolism, is a relatively straightforward attempt to understand these opposing energies.

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