Tulips Symbolism, Imagery & Wordplay

If you're looking for the central image in this poem, Plath lays it right out on the table for you in the title. Then she repeats it in the first line, just in case you were spacing out. This whole...

The color white is just about everywhere in this poem. It's on the walls, the sheets, the nurses' caps. If you're thinking, well that's normal for a hospital, where they like to keep things clean,...

Water is a Big Deal in "Tulips." To be fair, there are all kinds of powerful natural forces running through this poem (light, air, etc.), but water seems to pop up more than all the others, and it...

This one comes up pretty briefly, but it's a major moment in the poem nonetheless. Baggage means a couple of things here: both the stuff she carried to the hospital and the kind of things you can't...

Those tulips are red; that much we know. But what's up with that exactly? Why not have white tulips or blue tulips or yellow tulips? Part of the answer might lie in the fact that in this poem, red...

It's all in the eyes. The speaker in this poem feels alone, isolated and free from the outside world. Still, she also feels threatened, vulnerable, exposed to something out there that's watching he...

Compared to some of the other images in this poem, this one kind of flashes by. Still, we think it's a really important representation of the speaker's feelings about herself. The image of the pebb...