This verse is broken and she goes on to say she is “nobody”. This is very sinister. She could be a nobody because no one seems to really care about her. She has given everything “up to the nurses”, and her “history to the surgeons”. She has been in the hospital for so long she has lost her identity and she has been having so many operations that her body now belongs to the surgeons.
They have “propped her head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff”, and she is like an eye that will not shut. This is very good imagery because we can actually vision her being there. She is like an eye because maybe she has been there for so long and she is just not dying or rather shutting. It also could suggest that she has to take all the pain and torture in. There is another repetition here of the nurses passing. We can hear their sounds as they pass. Plath says that they pass and pass, she must be so fed up of seeing them. She might keep seeing them that she does not know which are which, as she says, “it is impossible to tell how many there are.”
She is of no use anymore because she is like a “pebble” in the sea. She is so minute and sort of irrelevant. On the other hand it could suggest that she is no trouble as she is as small as a pebble. The nurses bring her “numbness” with the injections.
“I have lost myself”, she has forgotten who she is and she is sick of all this baggage she has to keep. She carries a “patent overnight case”, and it is her pillbox. She over-exaggerates it because there are so many pills she has to take. Notice that this is black yet everything else is white. She is so sad and weak that the smiles of her “husband and child” catch onto her skin like hooks.
She is a “thirty year old cargo boat”, she is so old and she is full of a load, perhaps her pain is her load. She goes on to say “stubbornly hanging onto my name and address”, she does not know who she is all she has is her name and address stuck to her. They have “swabbed her clear” of her loving associations. She could be in a mental hospital and her family could be restricted from seeing her. Or they have simply forgotten her. Her family has taken out all her belongings and she watched them discard her “teaset” and “linen”. She has nothing attached to her now and she has been there for so long she has become “pure”.
“I didn’t want any flowers”, she did not want the tulips that she was getting for her get-well. It could be that she did not want anyone’s pity or sympathy. She is so much a peace is it making her mad.
The tulips she got were red and they “hurt” her. Everything was white but the tulips and the pillbox. The colour could have hurt her eyes or the redness could remind her of blood. They drive her mad and she describes them to be like “an awful baby”, crying out to her but she cannot do anything about them. Their “redness” talks to her wounds, which goes with what I said earlier that they probably remind her of blood. Her wounds are so subtle yet they are so heavy they can “weigh” her down. These tulips are irritating because they are always there and watching her. She is not used to it because “nobody watched her before”. “They turn” to her, they are relying on her to water them and keep them alive.
She goes on to describe how she sees herself, as “flat” and “ridiculous”, she has no depth or body to her. She is weak mentally and does not know anything. And physically she is withered.
“The tulips eat my oxygen”, they take out so much of her energy looking after them. Or flowers normally take in oxygen at night, and they take in all that she does have left. She was much happier without them, all in all she is saying she was much happier when she was not sick and in hospital. Towards the end of the poem, the weather seems to be changing. Everything is warming up now and it seems as if she is almost dying because she says “from a country far away as health”, this could suggest Heaven.
The poem does not have a rhyme, or a rhythm. The tone at the beginning is very sad, calm and ominous. Towards the end as things begin to warm up it becomes more of a relief and it takes us away from the ominous ness.
This then brings me to my conclusion. I personally enjoyed the poem a lot. The poet seems to be very depressed and I feel sympathy for her. I can relate to a lot of what she says about being in a hospital and I have come across a lot of depressed people. It is a very realistic poem, that’s what I mainly like about it.