Tulips / Bee Box / Balloons - A Close Reading

Link To Poems:

• Tulips
• The Arrival Of The Bee Box
• Balloons

An Introduction

Through the link Plath draws between the “vivid tulips” - with their insistence on a vibrant femininity - and the way they suffocate the first passage’s speaker and “eat” her oxygen, the pote forces readers to contemplate and empathise with the fervent struggle towards life and away from passivity. Across the passages, we are asked to explore this conflict and in all its atrophying glamour, as the female subjects oscillate between a wistful yearning for isolation and stasis - for not “committing” oneself to the ardours of life, let alone the activity insinuated by the continuous tense - and the potential for losing her poetic and maternal creativity and setting it “free”. Yet set against this depiction of a being on the uncertain precipice of change and transformation, throughout the passages runs a common thread of an immovable patriarchal force, the “fat jug” in ‘Balloons’ that quashes any attempts made by the poetic voice to release these “starry metals” of florid creativity on their cosmic ascension.

The Ides of March

The speaker’s depictions of the “clean wood box” in passage two, juxtaposed against its contents “angrily clambering” inside, foregrounds Plath’s exploration of the imminent struggle between female control and a more chaotic unbounded creativity. The subject’s tone initially in this poem exudes a form of decisive certainty, with the “square” box and conclusive “too heavy to lift” evoking a sense of simple conformity to the voice’s expectations as well as the weight of the object projecting an underlying rigidity and fixity. This authority is captured aptly in the stanza’s rhythm itself, as the brusque, staccato-like constructions produce an aural quality of assertive demeanour, suggesting the command the female subject has over the box - “...were there not such a din in it”. However, as the poem progresses and the relatively static rhythm shifts towards a more frantic, uninhibited forward movement - “Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!” - Plath asks readers to comprehend the inescapable frenzy of bees inside, themselves likely a metaphor for the effervescing bank of words vying for the voice’s attention that she attempts to keep “locked” within the recesses of her conscience. Whereas the subject at first seemed insisten on the unequivocal and familiar, a box that is “square”, the later repetition of something “dark” lurking with develops a more ominous sense of a decidedly unrestrained entity that defies expectations of rigidity, instead becoming a “swarm” of frenetic disorder. Indeed, despite attempts to externalise and render foregin the “African hands” inside the box, Plath nonetheless makes clear the futility of such endeavours, as the subject “can’t keep away from it”, forced paradoxically closer as if by allure to her words and her voice. The effect here, therefore, is one of an internal, rather than external, conflict, a clash between resisting and making sense of the “unintelligible syllables” that establish this overpowering, forward-driving, often verbose momentum. The first resolution presented is that of playing “Caesar” to this rioting force, an image that, in its allusion to a historical figure of masculine power, conjures a sense of coercion from the decisive hand of paternal or patriarchal posterity, safe from the slings and arrows of the present or future.Yet with the back-stabbing denouement of this historical reference, and in the speaker’s rejection of this unactualised potential, to “not” succumb to the role of dictatorial emperor - and thus not risk her own violent demise as Caesar so endured - she extends towards the alternative of a “sweet God”, one that seemingly unifies the conventional notion of maternal care with the commanding and absolute role of a Christian deity. And so, whilst this passage certainly synthesises an overall tumultuous and tense atmosphere between subject and voice, at this point in her writing, Plath offers readers with the optimistic possibility of cutting through the calculus and finding a uniquely female articulation, one not necessarily bound solely to either the strict and static dictates of her society, nor the regressive notion of a comforting, “honey”-sweet maternal affection.

Blood Red

Yet in the other poems, written at different times of her career, the message is not so translucent, if not uplifting. Plath instead unveils female subjects across these passages that become embroiled within an equivocal, oftentimes painful word of transformation. The “too red” tulips of the titular first poem, in the seemingly overwhelming visual stimulus they provide for the previously dormant and sombre speaker, attest to the confronting, unpleasant intrusion one feels into her isolated, almost meditative state of consciousness. Indeed, Plath works repeatedly to sustain the trauma that this revitalising transition threatens. On one level, the vulnerable melancholy of the voice - “a sunken rust-red engine” - in conjunction with the initially lethargic cadences of the poem ,speaks a to a desire for passivity, a stasis at the bottom of this “river” of the female experience as opposed to being swept up in its colourful, moving currents. On a deeper level, the tulips and their jarring redness, though symbolising a strong reminder of an invigorated fecundity - be it in the maternal or poetic sense - seem to grate against the subject, “upsetting” and causing “hurt” rather than offering an uplifting, revitalising push towards activity. This inharmonious dynamic is echoed again in the third poem, ‘Balloons’, as the domestic home becomes subsumed and rendered claustrophobic, in some sonse, from the poetic voice’s perspective, “taking up half the space” with their “invisible air drifts”. As with the flowers in ‘Tulips’ that become the “mouth of some African cat”, these invading balloons morph into “oval soul-animals”, an almost comic, playful description that belies the more sinister way in which they consume the attention of the subject, sporadically “moving and rubbing on the silk” in a perpetual state of motion. Nonetheless, this poem appears to move towards these intrusive objects of creativity rather than away. The jubilant note of curiosity, not antagonism, that pervades the initial utterances of the poem is annexed to comparisons of “free peacocks”, which gesture towards an ebullient liberation of a beautiful female subject. Such are the “queer moons” that the balloons become; rather than inflicting trauma, in Plath’s subtle allusion here perhaps to Robert Grave’s creation of the mythological White Goddess of the moon, they symbolise a transformation towards a burgeoning female identity. Contrarily, though the subject of ‘Tulips’ appears to become “aware” thanks to the flowers, of her own “bloom[ing]” heart, like the tears she tastes in the poem’s final lines, they are rendered distant, still largely foreign and unnatural to the speaker who seems to find comfort and safety in the “peacefulness” and “pure” sterility of her hospital room. Consequently, whilst not definitively crafting a transition of the female subject either towards or away from the thriving creativity of which she is capable of flaunting and towards which she begins to shift tentatively in this poem’s closing, integral for Plath across these passages is an establishment of the polarising reality she sees as inherent to the mid-20th century experience of womanhood, a plight the reader is asked to find compassion for as the woman is pulled between a desire for passivity, for escape from pain, and a rejection of the effaced and “dead furniture” that this renders her.

Plath's Own Trauma

Regardless, then, of the more light-hearted poetic imagery Plath employs for much of the third poem ‘Balloons’, like the other poems, it too concludes with a largely insidious depiction of the “red shred” of a tarnished female and literary creation. The regression from the initially flourishing, polysyllabic ruminations of the speaker - “Delighting the heart like wishes or free peacocks” - to the clipped ending of the passage - “Then sits back, fat jug” - drains the subject of her former fluidity and poetic finesse, replacing it instead with the militant forceful presence of the undisclosed brother. Whilst in some sense, this son many undoubtedly function as a synecdoche for the enervating demands of childhood on the speaker, when combined with the fact that Plath crafts the poem as an unspoken conservation between mother and daughter contemplating the “little fist” of a violent, tense masculinity, his presence is more provokingly read as the potent erosion of female creativity  and spirit by a product  (and future participant) of Plath’s patriarchal society. This establishes, for the reader, a precarious and fragile female subject, a “funny pink world” that whilst comical in nature, is one that the brother trivially “bites” in an image of singular and destructive consumption. Such a sentiment of vulnerability runs across into ‘Tulips’, too, where Plath evokes, through the hospital setting, the traditionally paternalistic, and therefore potentially ominous, doctor-patient relationship, one in which an exposed female like the speaker is forced to place her rehabilitation in the conventionally all-powerful (and almost-universally male) doctor. Plath, having the year prior to penning this poem undergone the unspeakable trauma of a joint misccariage and appendectomy, undoubtedly wishes to communicate her own angst at finding her health again - physically, spiritually and poetically - whilst being so reliant on male care. Even in ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’, the titular insects draw a biographical link between the poet and her beekeeper father, thereby weaving another layer of tension into the speaker’s frenetic disposition, as she subtextually grapples with paternal forms of authority and the overbearing fatherly presence this insinuates for Plath. And so, despite hinting at the possible escape from the liminal zone of uncertainty for her female subjects and emerging into a defined, unique voice, the resonating note across the poems is instead  an underlying acknowledgement of the latent pain of this entire enterprise, as the restricting forces of society stand ready to “eat” and devour such efforts  to transcend, or escape from the “square box”, whilst also being the sources of therapy and care for the very trauma that they have incurred.