"[1] Ted Hughes has stated "Tulips" was written about some flowers Plath received while in a hospital recovering from an appendectomy.
[2] Ted Hughes stated that the poem was written about a bouquet of tulips Plath received as she recovered from an appendectomy in the hospital.
Its subject is relatively straightforward: a woman, recovering from a procedure in a hospital, receives a bouquet of tulips that affront her with their glaring color and vividness.
The tulips work against her desire to "lie with [her] hands turned up and be utterly empty.” She personifies them with excitability, loud breathing, and eyes that watch her as she rests.
Marjorie Perloff writes that “in her anxiety, [Plath] equates the tulip petals with the ‘red blooms’ of her heart which insists on beating despite her desire for death.
She notes how, in the first four stanzas of the poem, the speaker “[describes] the world of the hospital in the yearning tones of one who has already turned her back on it and knows it is slipping away,” and in the fifth, she begins referring to her wish to stay in the past tense.
In other words, the verb tenses and tone suggest the speaker is slowly accepting her decision through the poem, rather than actively making the choice.
Uroff agrees, seeing the end of the poem as a tentative return to health, but also views the poem as an expression of the mind's ability to “generate hyperboles to torture itself.” In other words, he does not want the general interpretation – that the speaker chooses life – to distract from the harshness of her perspective towards life.
Barbara Hardy concurs, writing that the tulips are “inhabitants of the bizarre world of private irrational fantasy, even beyond the bridge of distorted science: they contrast with the whiteness of nullity and death, are like a baby, an African cat, is like her wound (a real red physical wound, stitched to heal, not to gape like opened tulips) and, finally, like her heart;” yet they, more than anything else, are what brings her back to life.
Eileen Aird remarks: "The world of Ariel is a black and white one into which red, which represents blood, the heart, and living is always an intrusion.
"[1][4] Renée R. Curry takes this further by claiming the tulips signify "by their glorious and bold colors, glaring Otherness.