Red tulips

Today I received a great gift: red tulips, my favourite flowers. They are so beautiful that I can spend hours staring at them; they seem so fragile, but their colour is so vivid and strong that it is impossible not to admire their greatness. They always remind me of Plath's poem, "Tulips"; the torment of staring at life without the hope of relief...of death:

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.

Life is more than she can bear, and the urgency of being liberated from life is enhanced by the lively presence of the flowers in a hospital room, where their colour "stains" whiteness:

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white wanddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.

This struggle is dazzling because she cannot reach neither oblivion nor unconsciousness; on the contrary, the tulips symbolize all she denies to have, it is a gift she did not asked for, because while she yearns for death, what she actually receives is life, that is, the tulips.

*Maybe I should quote the entire poem one of these days.

All I can say is that I love the "explosions" of life that the red tulips represent, but, at the same time, I confirm once again that beauty can always be as painful as hell.