TULIPS
The tulips are too excitable,
it is winter here.
Look how white everything
is, how quiet, how snowed-in
I am learning peacefulness,
lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these
white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing
to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my
day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anaesthetist
and my body to surgeons.
They have propped my head between
the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white
lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take
everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they
are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass
inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands,
one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell
how many there are.
My body is a pebble to them,
they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must
run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their
bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am
sick of baggage -
My patent leather overnight
case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling
out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my
skin, little smiling hooks.
I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old
cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my
name and address.
They have swabbed me clear
of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green
plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus
of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the
water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never
been so pure.
I didn't want any flowers,
I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned
up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no
idea how free -
The peacefulness is so big
it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name
tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on,
finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it,
like a Communion tablet.
The tulips are too red in the
first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper
I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white
swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound,
it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem
to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden
tongues and their colour,
A dozen red lead sinkers round
my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now
I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and
the window behind me
Where once a day the light
slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous,
a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun
and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have
wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
Before they came the air was
calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by
breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up
like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies
round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken
rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention,
that was happy
Playing and resting without
committing itself.
The walls, also, seem to be
warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind
bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth
of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart:
it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out
of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and
salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far
away as health.
http://bama.ua.edu/~clifford/lit/tulips.htm
THE EDGE
The woman
is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.
http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/edge.html
The life of Sylvia Plath is related to her poetry.
All her works are influenced by the events that happened in her life (biografias,
plath). These two poems, “Tulips” and “The edge”, are a sample
of that.
In the first one, Plath talks about flowers (tulips)
that she received when she was admitted in the hospital (wikipedia, plath).
In the poem, we can see the different states of mind that she passed. The
second poem also shows a state of mind, but in a different way. Here, she
shows a little indifference for her life; the first poem in this sense is
more optimistic than the second one. She is interested in her recovers, but
in “Edge”, it seems like she does not have any interest to keep alive.
Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963, and some of her poems are a clue
why she could do it. Sometimes, reading her poetry, you feel that she did
not want her life and she also had planned her suicide.
The structures of both poems are different but
in the two cases, they have free verses, apparently without a clear order.
In “Tulips” for example I can distinguish a hided melody: learning/lying,
lying by myself quietly, light lies, white walls). This poem has lots of
verses and you have to read quickly and without stops. “Edge” contrast
here because it is composed by only ten double verses which are separated
by a long stop that link it to the short length of the verses, and that causes
a slow reading of the poem, similar to the speed in the funerals when people
follow the hearse.
These poems have a cold tone because the first
one is located in a hospital room [the Bedlam Hospital, where she was (biografias,
plath)], a cold and silenced place that is always near to death, and the
second one is strictly speaking about it.
In the first poem it seems as if she had no personal
identity; in “Edge” she directly writes in the 3rd person.
Here, we see that she is always avoiding her own person. It is possible that
Plath felt as an object or like something without price, she did not priced
her life, and this could be one more reason for her suicide (“now I have
lost myself”).
When she received the tulips, this is not the present that she was waiting for. She waited for her own death. Like in another poem, “A birthday present”, it is ironic that the present is the Life, and she found her liberty rejecting it. Here, her only resistance is the photo of her family [children and husband, the poet Ted Hughes (biografias, plath)]. This is the one cause to keep alive.
I can find some symbols in these poems. In
“Tulips”, the world of Ariel is black and white and when the colour
red is introduced, this represents blood. She feels that the tulips can
repress someone who is taking care of him (in the worst case the tulips
only watch her), and this increases the sense of unreality.
In “Edge”, the title has a double meaning:
the edge of an axe is a symbol of death, because in the past, executioners
used it to kill people. Another meaning could be the edge as a limit between
life and death.
In the final part of “Tulips” we can see
the two alternatives that Plath had developed along the poem: accept life
and her identity in this world or travel to a new world created by her.
A place where she have complete liberty. In real life she chose the second
way committing suicide. In her poetry, I can think that she chose the same
option. In “Edge” she writes, “Body wears the smile of accomplishment”,
and shows us the happiness of being dead. She decided to fight against her
destiny.
It is very important to see how Plath never had
any pain to express her feelings and her way to see and understand things
and life, and also never had problems writing it in her poetry. Personally,
I think that she is a person to admire for her courage, but I do not know
if she was conscious that there were people who loved her and they would
cry for her death, I think that she was egoistic in this sense. A personal
experience tells me, you will never know the reasons and you will never understand
the acts if this person is not alive, because you cannot ask her. The death
of Sylvia Plath was announced long before, and after some attempts, she
followed her ideals and the way that she considered her own way.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
AUTHOR:
- Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre.
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath (22&23 May)
- La vida invisible de la señora lazaro.
http://www.psiquiatria24x7.com/bgpopup.jhtml?itemname=review§ion=vida_sra_lazaro (22&23 May)
- El arte de morir según sylvia plath.
El pais
http://www.ctv.es/USERS/borobar/sylvia.htm
(22&23 May)
- Welcome to my sylvia plath Page.
anjabe_sp@yahoo.com
http://www.sylviaplath.de/
(22&23 May)
o:p>
POEM:
- Tulips
http://bama.ua.edu/~clifford/lit/tulips.htm
(22&23 May)
- Edge
http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/edge.html
(22&23 May)
<