Ben Conley

A Flower is a Child’s Face
Sylvia Plath is a famous poet who has fascinated her readers for decades. Part of what makes her poetry so compelling is that it is confessional. But one of the more subtler aspects of her poetry, and where we see Plath’s true skill as a poet, is in her use of imagery. Plath uses the image of flowers prolifically in her poetry, and in the poems “Morning Song” and “Tulips” flowers are used to portray the themes of birth and infancy in both a positive and negative fashion.
“Morning Song” and “Tulips” are two very different poems that present two different perspectives on birth and infancy, but they do share both positive and negative depictions of these themes. In “Tulips” Plath writes about the chaos that a new-born child brings, but she also acknowledges the positive energy a child brings. In the very last stanza she describes the child using floral imagery saying that the child is a “bowl of red [that] blooms out of sheer love of me” (61). Plath also portrays the burdens of an infant positively in “Morning Song” when she mentions that the baby’s “moth-breath flickers among the flat pink roses” (10-11). She uses very delicate imagery of flowers to enhance the positive theme of infancy. Though the majority of floral imagery in “Tulips” is negative, there exists the single acknowledgment of the pleasure a child brings. This contributes to the inter-connectedness of these two poems, since “Morning Song” is a mostly positive poem. Though, like “Tulips”, in “Morning Song” there exists a dualism in the themes as well.
Though Plath portrays infants, and the burdens that come with them, positively in these two poems, she includes negative floral imagery as well. Even “Morning Song”, which is mostly positive, briefly shows the reader negative aspects of the theme of infancy. Plath tells us that “one cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral / In my Victorian nightgown” (13-14). She incorporates the supposedly positive imagery of flowers into the negative description of the heavy toll a baby has had on her body. Perhaps the most surprising use of floral imagery though, comes from “Tulips”. Throughout the poem Plath is describing her stay in the maternity ward of a hospital and refers to her newborn child as “the Tulips”. She treats the child as if it is a abhorrent creature and even says that “The Tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals” (78). This vividly negative floral imagery characterizes the theme of birth in “Tulips” and more subtle negative imagery in “Morning Song” is used to contribute to the wholeness of the theme of infancy.
This theme of infancy and birth, though portrayed in strikingly different ways between and within these two poems, is thoroughly enhanced by the use of flowers as an image. The image of flowers not only enhances the readers’ understanding of these two poems, but enriches the content of much of Plath’s other work. An understanding of the use of floral imagery used in her work allows for the fullness of her poetic prowess to be fully appreciated.