Tulips by Sylvia Plath

"Tulips" by Sylvia Plath

In my drawing, I chose to depict Sylvia Plath's poem "Tulips." While I am not a very good artist, I tried to convey the feelings she so beautifully described in her writing. In my drawing, Plath is on her hospital bed, her head "propped between the pillow and the sheet-cuff/Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut." When I showed the drawing to my friend (a much, much more talented drawer than I), he told me to make her head bigger so that the focus would be on her and not the passing nurses, but I think her smallness conveys the fact that she is drugged and scared and in a foreign place. The room is like a box containing her. If I could redo the picture, I would make the tulips brighter, because they clearly are the center of the poem. Plath describes them as being "too red" and says she can hear them breathe, eating her oxygen. "Now the air snags and eddies around them," she writes, so I drew little whisps of green around the vase.