A hospital in the winter is the primary setting of “Tulips.” However, Plath frequently blurs the boundary between the physical, external setting of the poem and the inner life she reveals throughout the body of the poem. For example, the opening line, “it is winter here,” both describes the physical place of the poem and the psychological state of the speaker (1). The “winter” makes everything “white,” “quiet,” and “snow-in,” adjectives that also come to describe Plath’s increasingly empty interiority as she “[learns] peacefulness, lying by myself quietly” (2-3).

The material conditions of the wintery world, then, come to intrude upon Plath’s mental state and come to metaphorically represent an aspect of her selfhood defined by negation. Similarly, later on in the poem, Plath describes how “They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations. / Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley / I watched my teaset...