Tulips by Sylvia Plath

Question 1

Context

Answer 1

• Written in 1961, Plath was in St Pancras Hospital London
• In February she suffered a miscarriage and in March she underwent an appendectomy
• Freida was already born in 1960
• Nicholas born June 1962

Question 2

Subject

Answer 2

This poem is a complex, infinitely layered poem that is a depiction of the speaker’s time in hospital.

Question 3

Form and Structure

Answer 3

• Septets- seven line stanzas in free verse.
• Form- apostrophe- speaker addresses inanimate object
• Main tension- the speaker’s desire for simplicity and death and the tulip’s encouragement towards a dangerous life.

Question 4

Language Techniques

Answer 4

-Personification of tulips,
“The tulips are too excitable”
-Enjambment reflects nature’s process,
“My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.”
Voice of a passive woman submitting to her physical and psychic confinement.
-Colour imagery
Black- Plath’s dissatisfaction with males, threatening colour
White- frozen emotional state. barrenness oblivion.
Green-endurance
-Water imagery is both threatening and compelling.

Question 5

Mood

Answer 5

The speaker in this poem feels negatively about the tulips creating a mood of resentment.